•  3
    "White, Fat, and Racist": Racism and Environmental Accounts of Obesity
    with Megan Dean
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 32 (4): 435-461. 2022.
    ABSTRACT:This paper offers a novel argument for the claim that "environmental" explanations of obesity meant to help address racial health disparities may actually reinforce racism. While some contend that these explanations reinforce racist and sizeist interracial dynamics, we argue that environmental explanations can bolster intraracial hierarchies of whiteness that reinforce white supremacy. Deployments of environmental accounts in contexts like the U.S. invoke and intertwine two damaging dic…Read more
  •  44
    ‘I Know What It's Like’: Epistemic Arrogance, Disability, and Race
    with Rachel Levit Ades
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (3): 531-551. 2022.
    Understanding and empathy on the part of those in privileged positions are often cited as powerful tools in the fight against oppression. Too often, however, those in positions of power assume they know what it is like to be less well off when, in actuality, they do not. This kind of assumption represents a thinking vice we dub synecdoche epistemic arrogance. In instances of synecdoche epistemic arrogance, a person who has privilege wrongly assumes, based on limited experiences, that she can kno…Read more
  •  22
    Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 274-282, March 2022.
  • Withholding Information to Protect a Loved One
    with Todd J. Kilbaugh, Daniel Groll, Wynne Morrison, and John D. Lantos
    Pediatrics 6 (136). 2016.
    Parents respond to the death of a child in very different ways. Some parents may be violent or angry, some sad and tearful, some quiet and withdrawn, and some frankly delusional. We present a case in which a father’s reaction to his daughter’s death is a desire to protect his wife from the stressful information. The wife is in the second trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and so is particularly fragile. We asked pediatricians and bioethicists to discuss the ways in which they might respond to th…Read more
  •  68
    Confronting White Ignorance: White Psychology and Rational Self‐Regulation
    Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (1): 50-71. 2020.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 50-71, Spring 2021.
  •  37
    Bioethics Education and Nonideal Theory
    In Elizabeth Victor & Laura K. Guidry-Grimes (eds.), Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics: Living and Dying in a Nonideal World, Springer. pp. 119-142. 2021.
    Bioethics has increasingly become a standard part of medical school education and the training of healthcare professionals more generally. This is a promising development, as it has the potential to help future practitioners become more attentive to moral concerns and, perhaps, better moral reasoners. At the same time, there is growing recognition within bioethics that nonideal theory can play an important role in formulating normative recommendations. In this chapter we discuss what this shift …Read more
  •  104
    White tears: emotion regulation and white fragility
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (1): 122-142. 2023.
    We contribute to the growing literature on white fragility by examining how the distinctively emotional manifestations of white fragility (which we dub ‘emotional white fragility’) make it more difficult for white people to have constructive, meaningful thoughts and conversations about race. We claim that emotional white fragility typically involves a failure of emotion regulation, or the ability to manage one’s emotions in real time. We suggest that this lack of emotion regulation can contribut…Read more
  •  164
    The dominant view in the philosophical literature contends that internalized oppression, especially that experienced in virtue of one's womanhood, reduces one's sense of agency. Here, I extend these arguments and suggest a more nuanced account. In particular, I argue that internalized oppression can cause a person to conceive of herself as a deviant agent as well as a reduced one. This self-conception is also damaging to one's moral identity and creates challenges that are not captured by merely…Read more