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22Separating the Signal from the Noise in Public Health Messaging: The UK’s COVID-19 ExperienceAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (4): 99-101. 2024.Spitale, Germani, and Biller-Andorno’s (2024) PHERCC matrix sets out a useful and systematic framework for risk and crisis communication in public health emergencies. A problem in ensuring effective messaging is the extent to which the messaging environment is *quiet* or *noisy*: in other words, whether or not a message has to *compete with other messages* at the same time. I use the example of the UK’s experience during COVID-19, which was marked by tensions between the devolved regional govern…Read more
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10Taylor Swift and the Ethics of Body ImageIn Catherine M. Robb, Georgie Mills & William Irwin (eds.), Taylor Swift and Philosophy: Essays from the Tortured Philosophers Department, The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. pp. 28-35. 2024.This chapter discusses the ethics of body image in relation to Taylor Swift's apparent experience of disordered eating and body shaming. I first contextualize Swift's experience, as it is depicted in the Netflix documentary /Miss Americana/, before connecting it to Heather Widdows' account of the contemporary beauty ideal in her book /Perfect Me/. I go on to explore the role of celebrity and gossip in the morality of beauty norms, since the burdens of dominant beauty ideals may fall disproportio…Read more
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488Unhealthy Environments Are a Problem of Structural InjusticeAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (3): 53-55. 2024.Ray and Cooper (2024) argue that bioethicists should take environmental justice seriously as a matter of health justice; as part of this project, they defend a legal right to a healthy environment....
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275EarthquakesIn Nathanaël Wallenhorst & Christoph Wulf (eds.), Handbook of the Anthropocene, Springer. pp. 127-132. 2023.Earthquakes are among the world’s deadliest natural phenomena. On an increasingly crowded Earth, earthquake risk management therefore should be taken seriously as a global policy problem. Thus, this chapter discusses some of the ethical dimensions of earthquakes as a phenomenon of planetary significance in the Anthropocene. I do not attempt an exhaustive survey, but consider one background ethical issue: the kinds of harms that occur when an earthquake impacts human habitation. We may distinguis…Read more
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1823The Narrative Coherence Standard and Child Patients' Capacity to ConsentAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (1): 40-42. 2020.Aryeh Goldberg compellingly argues for a Narrative Coherence Standard (NCS) to bolster existing methods of assessing patients' mental capacity. But his account fails to distinguish between the cognitive abilities of children and adults; consequently, worries may be raised about the scope of the NCS, in particular when we consider child patients. In this article, I argue the NCS cannot plausibly apply to children. Since children's self-conception does not arrive fully formed — but rather is a pro…Read more
Coventry, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Political Theory |
Applied Ethics |
Environmental Ethics |
Philosophy of Earth Sciences |