Jessica Miller

Romance novels have been justly criticized for either ignoring disability or for portraying disability in problematic ways, for example, as something that can be “overcome” by romantic love. This paper analyzes the representation of chronic illness in three contemporary romance novels which feature interabled relationships between heroines with disabilities and nondisabled heroes. It finds that they subvert dominant pernicious attitudes towards disability, in particular that people with chronic illnesses are not desired or desiring and that the “happily ever after” promised by the romance genre is impossible if one partner has a disability. The novels do this through an exploration of vulnerability. In each novel, the heroines move from a negative understanding of vulnerability as mere susceptibility to harm, to a positive view of vulnerability as a condition for the possibility of healthy and fulfilling romantic love. In doing so, they can be viewed as a positive literary response to the call by feminist disability scholars to conceptualize vulnerability as a potent force for ethical relations, the acknowledgement of which can destabilize the harmful binary of abled versus disabled.

The focus of this work is interpersonal trust, by which I mean trust between individual persons. This work formulates and defends an account of interpersonal trust as an affective attitude, the presence and quality of which has significant ethical and social-political consequences. A major task of the dissertation is to dispel the assumption common to the majority of writings on trust that trust is a mere fail-safe social mechanism which, in a world of perfectly omniscient, or perfectly moral beings, would not be needed. I will argue that a philosophical accounting of trust is both possible and desirable, but that it can only be given in the context of an ethical approach that recognizes the importance of affect, character, and relationships to moral life. ;Chapter One is a critical exposition of some contemporary approaches to interpersonal trust, which tend to be dominated by rational choice models. I argue that such accounts of trust are best incomplete, in part because they miss the affective component of trust. In Chapter Two, I develop an account of interpersonal trust as an affective attitude. I claim that all forms of interpersonal trust are characterized by an affective base which gives rise to beliefs, desires and expectations about the trustee. This affective base may be described as security, confidence, hopefulness, or optimism, depending on the situation, but in all cases it gives rise to a view of the trusted as competent and benevolent. Understood this way, trust is a felt way of seeing which constitutes an active interpretation of interpersonal reality. ;In Chapters Three and Four, I contend that discussions of the moral significance of trust must be reoriented towards an approach which makes the moral identity of the agent central to moral reflection and judgment. I argue that trust is a form of moral affirmation which is indispensable to strong moral self-definition, to having a good character , and to effective moral judgment. I conclude by analyzing the social and political consequences of trust and distrust between members of different social groups

In the early 2000s, several states legalized marijuana for medicinal uses. Since then, more and more states have either decriminalized or legalized marijuana use for medical or recreational purposes. Federal law has remained unchanged. The state-level decriminalization of marijuana and the concomitant de-stigmatizing and mainstreaming is likely to lead to greater use among the general population, including among nursing mothers. Marijuana is already one of the most widely used illicit substances among lactating women. There exist few studies demonstrating the effects of marijuana in breast milk on nursing babies. In the present context of a changing legal landscape, shifting cultural beliefs, and the absence of clear professional guidelines, healthcare professionals are faced with ethical questions around how best to support nursing mothers and their babies when marijuana use is a factor. This paper first presents an overview of the law, science, and professional guidelines as they relate to marijuana and breastfeeding. Then, I offer an assessment of the relevant ethical issues providers and their patients may need to navigate.

Recent literature on trust commonly contains the claim that the trust which characterizes intimate relationships is a different phenomenon altogether from the trust that characterizes professional and other sorts of non-intimate relationships. In this paper I argue that while there are important differences among kinds of trust, an invidious distinction between trust in strangers and trust infriends is not only unwarranted but it obscures the fundamentally affective and relational base of all forms of interpersonal trust. In this essay I construct an account of interpersonal trust, which recognizes the similarities that pervade its different forms. Without such a complex approach, we lose theoretical sight not only of key features of trust, but of the relationship of trust to significant dimensions of human existence.

ABSTRACT Defining a nonpaternalistic yet achievable form of trust in medicine in an era of simultaneous patient empowerment and institutional control has been and remains an important task of bioethics. The ‘crisis of trust’ in medicine has been viewed mainly as the problem of getting patients to trust their health care providers, especially physicians. However, since paradigmatic cases of trust are mutual, bioethicists must pay more attention to physician trust in patients. A physician’s view of the reasonableness of trust in a particular patient is affected not just by his or her relationship with that patient, but also by what is going on institutionally, professionally, legally, and politically with regard to a given treatment or intervention. Since general moral principles are insufficient in determining the moral value and reasonableness of trust in particular instances, I discuss in detail the role of trust and distrust in the specific case of treating patients with medications implicated in drug abuse. I conclude that it is important to become aware, first, of the clinical significance of physician trust and distrust in patients, and second, of the many factors which inform both of these moral attitudes. These two claims together suggest that a central, but overlooked, virtue of medical practice is reflective, context‐responsive trust in patients.

This paper explores the ways in which trust and distrust, especially among relative strangers, are connected to social identities and locations. It begins by sketching an account of interpersonal trust, emphasizing the role that socially salient identities, based in part upon cultural figurations, play in their development. It then contends that these cultural figurations both foster and result from distrust of specific social groups, including African Americans, the poor, and (some) women. Treating social roles and relations as central to moral analysis enables an understanding of the injustice of some forms of social distrust which does not imply that one individual’s distrust of another is culpable in a straightforward way. The paper then develops the claim that one’s social location can affect the moral desirability of trust and distrust, concluding that social distrust can sometimes function as a kind of dissident attitude, a political stance with emancipatory potential.

In this paper, we move toward offering psychological benchmarks to measure success in building increasingly humanlike robots. By psychological benchmarks we mean categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical propositions. Nine possible benchmarks are considered: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Finally, we discuss how getting the right group of benchmarks in human–robot interaction will, in future years, help inform on the foundational question of what constitutes essential features of being human.

In this paper, we move toward offering psychological benchmarks to measure success in building increasingly humanlike robots. By psychological benchmarks we mean categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical propositions. Nine possible benchmarks are considered: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Finally, we discuss how getting the right group of benchmarks in human–robot interaction will, in future years, help inform on the foundational question of what constitutes essential features of being human.