•  4
    Situated Personhood: Insights from Caregivers of Minimally Communicative Individuals
    with Molly Kelleher, Rossio Motta-Ochoa, Stefanie Blain-Moraes, and Laura Specker Sullivan
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 16 (2): 64-94. 2023.
    For caregivers of minimally communicative individuals, providing support in the absence of clearly meaningful responses is ethically fraught. We conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data from caregivers of individuals who are minimally communicative, including persons with advanced dementia and individuals in disorders of consciousness. Our analysis led to two central claims: (1) Personhood is a threshold concept that is situated, relational, and dynamic and (2) in circumstances in whic…Read more
  •  23
    Skepticism, the Virtue of Preemptive Distrust
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-18. forthcoming.
    How does trust operate under conditions of oppression? Little attention has been paid to how distrust may be both necessary and costly to its bearer. Distrust is clearly warranted under certain conditions, but do those conditions contribute to a reduction in one's overall well-being? More importantly, is there something about distrust itself (rather than the conditions that warrant it) that contributes to this reduction in well-being? In this essay, I explore these questions in depth. I explain …Read more
  •  53
    Recognition trust
    Philosophical Studies 178 (11): 3799-3818. 2021.
    Trust is critical for social life, and yet it is alarmingly fragile. It is easily damaged and difficult to repair. Philosophers studying trust have often noted that basic kind of trust needs to be in place in order for social life to be possible. Although philosophers have suggested that basic trust must exist, they have not tried to describe in explicit terms what this basic trust looks like, or how it comes to be. In this article I will identify and describe a basic form of trust that I call r…Read more
  •  33
    Trust as a Test for Unethical Persuasive Design
    Philosophy and Technology 34 (4): 767-783. 2020.
    Persuasive design draws on our basic psychological makeup to build products that make our engagement with them habitual. It uses variable rewards, creates Fear of Missing Out, and leverages social approval to incrementally increase and maintain user engagement. Social media and networking platforms, video games, and slot machines are all examples of persuasive technologies. Recent attention has focused on the dangers of PD: It can deceptively prod users into forming habits that help the company’…Read more
  •  269
    Novices face a problem when it comes to forming true beliefs about controversial issues that they cannot assess themselves: Who are the trustworthy experts? Elizabeth Anderson offers a set of criteria intended to allow novices to form reliable assessments of expert trustworthiness. All they need to assess experts is a high-school education and access to the internet. In this paper, I argue that novices face a much harder time using her criteria effectively than we would expect or hope. This prob…Read more
  •  53
    J. M. Bernstein argues that to capture the depths of the harm of torture, we need to do away with the idea that we possess intrinsic and inviolable worth. If personhood is inviolable, then torture can inflict only apparent harm on our standing as persons. Bernstein claims that torture is a paradigm of moral injury because it causes what he calls “devastation”: The victim experiences an actual degradation of his or her personhood. Bernstein argues that our value is given to us through mutual reco…Read more
  •  46
    Imagination, Prophecy, and Morality: The Relevance and Limits of Spinoza's Theory of Political Myth
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2014 (169): 64-83. 2014.
    Myth presents us with two major problems: definition and usage. In this paper I focus on the latter problem and argue in defense of Spinoza’s theory of political myth as opposed to the dichotomy of “myth as progress” and “myth as regression.” Spinoza’s theory is preferable because it allows for a full-bodied understanding of myth, its legitimate uses and its dangers for slipping into superstition. Because myth plays on the imagination, the basest form of knowledge available to all people and …Read more