•  3
    Riding Like a Girl
    with Pata Suyemoto
    In Fritz Allhoff, Jesús Ilundáin‐Agurruza & Michael W. Austin (eds.), Cycling ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Start Line Lap One, Where Cycling Practice Meets Feminist Ethics Lap Two, Words from Our Teammates or The Dirt Documentaries Lap Three, Different Lines, Same Course Last Lap, How Women Cyclists Transform Cycling.
  •  37
    In this response to Jonny Anomaly’s ‘Is Obesity a Public Health Problem?’ I argue, contra the author that public health actually increases individuals’ abilities to choose actions that further their health goals, specifically in the case of obesity. The intractability of obesity as an individual medical problem combined with the health benefits of modest (5–10 per cent of body weight) weight loss suggest that public health measures helping people make small changes in eating habits improve popul…Read more
  •  77
    Feminist bioethics meets experimental philosophy: Embracing the qualitative and experiential
    with Norah Mulvaney-Day
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 5 (1): 113-132. 2012.
    Experimental philosophers advocate expansion of philosophical methods to include empirical investigation into the concepts used by ordinary people in reasoning and action. We propose also including methods of qualitative social science, which we argue serve both moral and epistemic goals. Philosophical analytical tools applied to interdisciplinary research designs can provide ways to extract rich contextual information from subjects. We argue that this approach has important implications for bio…Read more
  • The Crucial Role of Proof: A Classical Defense Against Mathematical Empiricism
    Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1993.
    Mathematical knowledge seems to enjoy special status not accorded to scientific knowledge: it is considered a priori and necessary. We attribute this status to mathematics largely because of the way we come to know it--through following proofs. Mathematics has come under attack from sceptics who reject the idea that mathematical knowledge is a priori. Many sceptics consider it to be a posteriori knowledge, subject to possible empirical refutation. In a series of three papers I defend the a prior…Read more
  •  39
    Ethical and epistemic issues in direct-to-consumer drug advertising: where is patient agency? (review)
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 16 (2): 275-280. 2013.
    Arguments for and against direct-to-consumer drug advertising (DTCA) center on two issues: (1) the epistemic effects on patients through access to information provided by the ads; and (2) the effects of such information on patients’ abilities to make good choices in the healthcare marketplace. Advocates argue that DTCA provides useful information for patients as consumers, including information connecting symptoms to particular medical conditions, information about new drug therapies for those c…Read more
  •  34
    Obesity is defined and identified in a number of ways, depending on whether it is in a medical, social, public health, or other context. After a brief primer on obesity, its causes and effects (and in particular its gender-based effects), this entry will examine weight stigmatization in more detail, giving an overview of some of the major results of studies across social science and public health fields. Next will be a discussion of two main approaches from which to understand and address effect…Read more
  •  12
    Understanding the relationship between obesity and fast food consumption encompasses a broad range of individual level and environmental factors. One theoretical approach, the health capability framework, focuses on the complex set of conditions allowing individuals to be healthy. This qualitative study aimed to identify factors that influence individual level health agency with respect to healthy eating choices in uniformly constrained environments. We used an inductive qualitative research des…Read more
  •  35
    Calorie labeling on menus is one of the more recent public health responses to calls for increased access to nutrition information. The goal is to encourage consumers to make more healthy food choices. In this commentary on ‘Equity in Public Health Ethics: The Case of Menu Labelling Policy at the Local Level’, I focus first on research supporting health equity-directed goals for menu labeling policies; then I turn to the issue of challenges and opportunities for menu labeling as a part of local …Read more
  •  71
    Obesity, identity and community: Leveraging social networks for behavior change in public health
    with Norah Mulvaney-Day
    Public Health Ethics 2 (3): 250-260. 2009.
    Obesity is a public health problem influenced by behavioral patterns that span an ecological spectrum of individual-level factors, social network factors and environmental factors. Both individual and environmental approaches necessarily include significant influences from social networks, but how and under what conditions social networks influence behavior change is often not clearly mapped out either in the obesity literature or in many intervention designs. In this paper, we provide an analys…Read more