•  20
    More Process, Less Principles: The Ethics of Deploying AI and Robotics in Medicine
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (1): 121-134. 2024.
    Current national and international guidelines for the ethical design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics emphasize ethical theory. Various governing and advisory bodies have generated sets of broad ethical principles, which institutional decisionmakers are encouraged to apply to particular practical decisions. Although much of this literature examines the ethics of designing and developing AI and robotics, medical institutions typically must make purchase and deployment …Read more
  •  10
    An Ethical Case for Medical Scribes
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (1): 95-104. 2022.
    This article addresses ethical concerns with the use of electronic health records (EHRs) by physicians in clinical practice. It presents arguments for two claims. First, requiring physicians to maintain patient EHRs for medically unnecessary tasks is likely contributing to increased burnout, decreased quality of care, and potential risks to patient safety. Second, medical institutions have ethical reasons to employ medical scribes to maintain patient EHRs. Finally, this article reviews central o…Read more
  •  42
    As costs decline and technology inevitably improves, current trends suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) and a variety of "carebots" will increasingly be adopted in medical care. Medical ethicists have long expressed concerns that such technologies remove the human element from medicine, resulting in dehumanization and depersonalized care. However, we argue that where shame presents a barrier to medical care, it is sometimes ethically permissible and even desirable to deploy AI/carebots bec…Read more
  •  56
    Does Affective Empathy Require Perspective-Taking or Affective Matching?
    American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (3): 277-287. 2019.
    Affective empathy has been variously characterized. First, I argue that we have reasons to prefer a narrower account of affective empathy, which requires the cognitive mechanisms of perspective-taking. Second, I mount a challenge to the standard account of affective matching thought to be required for affective empathy. On one widely held view, affective empathy requires an actual affective match between the subject and the target of empathy. I reject this view. While empathy often involves an a…Read more
  •  41
    Should physicians be empathetic? Rethinking clinical empathy
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 39 (5): 347-360. 2018.
    The role and importance of empathy in clinical practice has been widely discussed. This paper focuses on the ideal of clinical empathy, as involving both cognitive understanding and affective resonance. I argue that this account is subject to a number of objections. Affective resonance may serve more as a liability than as a benefit in clinical settings, and utilizing this capacity is not clearly supported by the relevant empirical literature. Instead, I argue that the ideal account of empathy i…Read more
  •  50
    J. S. Mill on Coolie Labour and Voluntary Slavery
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (4): 754-766. 2013.
    This article discusses John Stuart Mill's voluntary slavery argument in On Liberty. The author shows that standard interpretations of the argument rely on the assumption that part of Mill's objection to voluntary slavery is the permanent nature of the decision. However, in correspondence, Mill also objects to voluntary ‘coolie’ labour contracts, which he regards as a form of slavery. This produces difficulties for standard interpretations of the voluntary slavery argument. Finally, the author pr…Read more