• Ethical and Scientific Issues in Cancer Screening and Prevention
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 37 (3): 310-323. 2012.
    November 2009’s announcement of the USPSTF’s recommendations for screening for breast cancer raised a firestorm of objections. Chief among them were that the panel had insufficiently valued patients’ lives or allowed cost considerations to influence recommendations. The publicity about the recommendations, however, often either simplified the actual content of the recommendations or bypassed significant methodological issues, which a philosophical examination of both the science behind screening…Read more
  • Safe, or Sorry? Cancer Screening and Inductive Risk
    Anya Plutynski
    In Kevin Christopher Elliott & Ted Richards (eds.), Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science, Oup Usa. pp. 149-169. 2017.
    The focus of this chapter will be on the epistemic and normative questions at issue in debates about cancer screening, with a special focus on mammography as a case study. Such questions include: How do we know who needs to be screened? What are the benefits and harms of cancer screening, and what is the quality of evidence for each? How ought we to measure and compare these benefits and harms? What are the sources of uncertainty about our estimates of benefit and harm? Why are such issues so co…Read more
  • What is praise? I argue that we can make progress by examining what praise does. Functionalist views of praise are emerging, but I here argue that by foregrounding cases in which expressions of praise are rejected by their direct target, we see that praise has a wider, and largely overlooked, social function. I introduce cases in which praise is rejected, and develop a functionalist account of praise that is well placed to make sense of the contours of these cases. My claim is that praise functi…Read more