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121The Capabilities Approach to Justice and the Flourishing of Nonsentient LifeEthics and the Environment 18 (1): 19-38. 2013.According to Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach (CA) to justice, a (liberal) society is just if it provides people with the means to actualize basic capabilities that are necessary for a dignified human life. In Frontiers of Justice, Nussbaum (2006) expands the CA to include sentient nonhuman animals in the sphere of justice (as opposed, for instance, to the sphere of compassion). As it does for humans, justice requires that sentient creatures have the ability to access capabilities necessa…Read more
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11The Concept of "Woman": Feminism after the Essentialism CritiqueMA Thesis. 2008.Although feminists resist accounts that define women as having certain features that are essential to their being women, feminists are also guilty of giving essentialist definitions. Because women are extremely diverse in their experiences, the essentialist critics question whether a universal account of women can be given. I argue that it is possible to formulate a valuable category of woman, despite potential essentialist challenges. Even with diversity among women, women are oppressed as wome…Read more
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13Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act justifies its non-commercialization approach to surrogacy on the grounds that commercial payments for surrogacy commodify women and are exploitative. However, empirical evidence suggests that payments in surrogacy are not exploitative, at least not to an extent that would warrant criminalizing payments. Given skepticism about the connection between exploitation and commodification, I explore whether commodification critiques can ground an alternative just…Read more
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34Refugee Resettlement, Rootlessness, and AssimilationArendt Studies 3 25-47. 2019.We explore how a refugee’s experience of rootlessness may persist after they resettle in a new country. Drawing primarily on “We Refugees,” we focus on assimilation as an uprooting phenomenon that compels a person to forget their roots, thereby perpetuating threats to identity and the loss of community that is a condition for political agency. Arendt presents assimilation in a binary way: a person either conforms to or resists pressures to conform. We seek to move beyond this binary, arguing tha…Read more
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24Embodied Judgment in Hannah Arendt: From Boethius and Huck Finn to Transnational FeminismsPhaenEx 9 (2): 64-87. 2014.Feminists have found Arendt helpful in articulating a theory of judgment across cultural differences. Embodiment enters this discussion, usually, through attention to enlarged mentality. In contrast, I approach embodiment and judgment by looking at undertheorized connections with Arendt’s conception of “thinking.” Drawing on a discussion of Boethius and Huckleberry Finn, I suggest that persons are led to thinking by lived contradictions, that is, by instances in which their experiences cannot be…Read more
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36Pets and people: The ethics of our relationships with companion animals Christine overall (ed). Oxford: Oxford university press, 2017; 328 pp.; $36.95 (review)Dialogue 58 (3): 586-587. 2019.
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22Hannah Arendt and Feminist AgencyDissertation, Western University (Canada). 2012.My goal in this dissertation is to articulate an Arendtian conception of feminist agency, that is, agency that aims at resistance from within oppressive situations. There is a tendency in feminist literature to depict women in the global south as if they are passive victims of their oppression, with no opportunities to resist. This tendency is replicated in feminist responses to transnational contract pregnancy, the practice in which people travel across national borders to hire a woman to gesta…Read more
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30Cross-Border Reproductive Travel, Neocolonialism, and Canadian PolicyInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 10 (1): 225-247. 2017.The 2004 Canadian Assisted Human Reproduction Act bans commercial contract pregnancy and egg provision, but Canadians undertake cross-border reproductive travel to access these services. Feminist bioethicists have argued that the ethical justification for enforcing the ban domestically, namely exploitation, grounds its extraterritorial enforcement. I raise an additional problem when Global Southern or low-income countries are destinations for travel: neocolonialism. Further, I argue that a ban o…Read more
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49Commercial Contract Pregnancy in India, Judgment, and Resistance to OppressionHypatia 30 (4): 846-861. 2015.Feminist scholars have done much to identify oppressive forces within transnational commercial contract pregnancy and its social context that may coerce women into becoming gestational laborers. Feminists have also been careful not to depict gestational laborers as merely passive victims of oppression, though there is disagreement about the degree to which contract pregnancy offers opportunities for agency. In this article I consider how women who sell gestational labor may be agents against the…Read more
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23The patient‐worker: A model for human research subjects and gestational surrogatesDeveloping World Bioethics 18 (4): 310-320. 2017.We propose the ‘patient-worker’ as a theoretical construct that responds to moral problems that arise with the globalization of healthcare and medical research. The patient-worker model recognizes that some participants in global medical industries are workers and are owed worker's rights. Further, these participants are patient-like insofar as they are beneficiaries of fiduciary relationships with healthcare professionals. We apply the patient-worker model to human subjects research and commerc…Read more
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61An Anti-Commodification Defense of VeganismEthics, Policy and Environment 19 (3): 285-300. 2016.We develop an anti-commodification defense of ethical veganism which holds that common defenses of ethical veganism can benefit from treating the commodification of non-human animals as a serious, distinct moral wrong. Drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Anderson’s account of commodification, we develop an account of commodification that identifies most uses of animals in developed countries as forms of problematic commodification. We then show that this position can make significant contribution…Read more
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53Monica Mueller, Contrary to Thoughtlessness: Rethinking Practical Wisdom: Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012. 130 pp. ISBN 978-0-7391-4615-6, $55.00 (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 47 (1-2): 163-166. 2013.
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
20th Century Philosophy |