Medford, Massachusetts, United States of America
  •  10
    The Moral Permissibility of Perspective-Taking Interventions
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1-16. forthcoming.
    Interventions designed to promote perspective taking are increasingly prevalent in educational settings, and are also being considered for applications in other domains. Thus far, these perspective-taking interventions (PTIs) have largely escaped philosophical attention, however they are sometimes prima facie morally problematic in at least two respects: they are neither transparent nor easy to resist. Nontransparent or hard-to-resist PTIs call for a moral defense and our primary aim in this pap…Read more
  •  175
    Feminist philosophers have long emphasized the ways in which women’s oppression takes a variety of forms depending on complex combinations of factors. These include women’s objectification, dehumanization and unjust gendered divisions of labour caused in part by sexist ideologies regarding women’s social role. This paper argues that feminized artificial intelligence (feminized AI) poses new and important challenges to these perennial feminist philosophical issues. Despite the recent surge in the…Read more
  •  33
    When and why to empathize with political opponents
    Philosophical Studies 180 (3): 773-793. 2022.
    Affective polarization is characterized by deep antagonism between political opponents and is an issue of growing concern. Some philosophers have recently suggested empathy as a possible remedy. In particular, it has been suggested that empathy might mitigate the harm resulting from affective polarization by helping us find common ground across our differences. While these discussions provide a helpful starting point, important questions regarding the conditions under which empathizing and findi…Read more
  •  64
    Empathy and Common Ground
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 459-473. 2021.
    Critics of empathy—the capacity to share the mental lives of others—have charged that empathy is intrinsically biased. It occurs between no more than two people, and its key function is arguably to coordinate and align feelings, thoughts, and responses between those who are often already in close personal relationships. Because of this, critics claim that empathy is morally unnecessary at best and morally harmful at worst. This paper argues, however, that it is precisely because of its ability t…Read more
  •  567
    The Nature of Empathy
    with Shannon Spaulding and Rita Svetlova
    In Felipe De Brigard & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (eds.), Philosophy of Neuroscience, Mit Press. pp. 49-77. 2022.
    Empathy is many things to many people. Depending on who you ask, it is feeling what another person feels, feeling bad for another person’s suffering, understanding what another person feels, imagining yourself in another person’s situation and figuring out what you would feel, or your brain activating as if you were experiencing the emotion another person is experiencing. These are just some of the various notions of empathy that are at play in philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, develo…Read more
  •  69
    A typology of empathy and its many moral forms
    Philosophy Compass 14 (10). 2019.
    Debates about empathy's role in morality are notoriously complex. On the one hand, proponents of empathy argue that it plays a crucial role in the process of making moral judgments, moral motivation, moral development, and the cultivation of meaningful personal relationships. On the other hand, critics of empathy warn that it is especially susceptible to a number of morally troubling biases and motivational shortcomings. Yet there is little consensus about what empathy is or what it might be goo…Read more