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7The Coupled Ethical-Epistemic Model as a Resource for Feminist Philosophy of Science, and a Case Study Applying the Model to the Demography of Hispanic IdentityIn Heidi Elizabeth Grasswick & Nancy Arden McHugh (eds.), Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Philosophers Engage Case Studies, Suny Press. pp. 47-71. 2021.
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30Environmental Justice for Whom?American Journal of Bioethics 24 (3): 24-26. 2024.Ray and Cooper (2024) make a very compelling argument for vastly increasing bioethicists’ engagement with environmental justice. I strongly support this proposal and agree with their arguments. Yet...
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8Fifty Years of U.S. Mass Incarceration and What It Means for BioethicsHastings Center Report 53 (6): 25-35. 2023.A growing body of literature has engaged with mass incarceration as a public health problem. This article reviews some of that literature, illustrating why and how bioethicists can and should engage with the problem of mass incarceration as a remediable cause of health inequities. “Mass incarceration” refers to a phenomenon that emerged in the United States fifty years ago: imprisoning a vastly larger proportion of the population than peer countries do, with a greatly disproportionate number of …Read more
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31The Need for Social Ethics in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science Graduate Programs: Results from a Nation-Wide Survey in the United StatesScience and Engineering Ethics 23 (2): 565-588. 2017.Professionals in environmental fields engage with complex problems that involve stakeholders with different values, different forms of knowledge, and contentious decisions. There is increasing recognition of the need to train graduate students in interdisciplinary environmental science programs in these issues, which we refer to as “social ethics.” A literature review revealed topics and skills that should be included in such training, as well as potential challenges and barriers. From this revi…Read more
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2Race in MedicineIn Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
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34Why Race and Ethnicity Are Not Like Other Risk FactorsPhilosophy of Medicine 2 (1). 2021.Since early in the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been wide disparities observed between different US racial groups’ rates of Covid-19 infections and deaths. This challenges physicians and patients to untangle what these race-associated risks mean for an individual patient. I argue that this task of providing individualized risk advice requires physicians to apply two skills: structural competency and epistemic humility.
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30White Privilege, White Poverty: Reckoning with Class and Race in AmericaHastings Center Report 51 (S1): 51-57. 2021.This essay argues that a failure to think and talk critically and candidly about White privilege and White poverty is a key threat to the United States of America's precarious democracy. Whiteness frames one of America's most pressing collective challenges—the poor state of the nation's health, which lags behind other wealthy nations and is marred by deep and entrenched class‐ and race‐based inequities. The broadscale remedies experts recommend demand what is in short supply: trust in evidence, …Read more
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40The Predictable Inequities of COVID-19 in the US: Fundamental Causes and Broken InstitutionsKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 30 (3): 191-214. 2020.“Nobody had ever seen anything like this before.”“Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”There is a lot at stake in the current and forthcoming debates over what/why/how the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the US were unpredictable. These debates are crucial to both our assessments of backward-looking culpability and in the related but even more socially important task of guiding decisions about how to rebuild society after the pandemic subsides. The more we treat t…Read more
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13The Dynamics of Public Health Responsibility: A Commentary on "Public Health and Precarity" by Michael D. Doan and Ami HarbinInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 13 (2): 135-140. 2020.Health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life; where they learn, work, play and love. Health is created by caring for oneself and others, by being able to take decisions and have control over one's life circumstances, and by ensuring that the society one lives in creates conditions that allow the attainment of health by all its members.To begin, I largely agree with Doan and Harbin's argument in "Public Health and Precarity," and by extension I largely agree wi…Read more
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32Coupled Ethical-Epistemic Analysis as a Tool for Environmental ScienceEthics, Policy and Environment 22 (3): 267-286. 2019.This paper presents a new model for how to jointly analyze the ethical and evidentiary dimensions of environmental science cases, with an eye toward making science more participatory and publically...
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52Reflecting on what philosophy of epidemiology is and does, as the field comes into its own: Introduction to the Special Issue on Philosophy of EpidemiologySynthese 198 (Suppl 10): 2383-2392. 2019.This article is an introduction to the Synthese Special Issue, Philosophy of Epidemiology. The overall goals of the issue are to revisit the state of philosophy of epidemiology and to provide a forum for new voices, approaches, and perspectives in the philosophy of epidemiology literature. The introduction begins by drawing on Geoffrey Rose’s work on how to conceptualize and design interventions for populations, rather than individuals. It then goes on to highlight some themes that emerged in th…Read more
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42A pluralistic and socially responsible philosophy of epidemiology field should actively engage with social determinants of health and health disparitiesSynthese 198 (Suppl 10): 2589-2611. 2019.Philosophy of epidemiology has recently emerged as a distinct branch of philosophy. The field will surely benefit from pluralism, reflected in the broad range of topics and perspectives in this special issue. Here, I argue that a healthy pluralistic field of philosophy of epidemiology has social responsibilities that require the field as a whole to engage actively with research on social determinants of health and health disparities. Practicing epidemiologists and the broader community of public…Read more
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61Population health has recently grown from a series of loosely connected critiques of twentieth-century public health and medicine into a theoretical framework with a corresponding field of research—population health science. Its approach is to promote the public’s health through improving everyday human life: affordable nutritious food, clean air, safe places where children can play, living wages, etc. It recognizes that addressing contemporary health challenges such as the prevalence of type 2 …Read more
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25Scientific Method in Brief by Hugh G. Gauch Jr. (review)History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 35 (3): 488--489. 2013.
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17Erratum to: The Need for Social Ethics in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science Graduate Programs: Results from a Nation-Wide Survey in the United StatesScience and Engineering Ethics 23 (2): 589-589. 2017.
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25The Need for Social Ethics in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science Graduate Programs: Results from a Nation-Wide Survey in the United StatesScience and Engineering Ethics 23 (2): 565-588. 2017.Professionals in environmental fields engage with complex problems that involve stakeholders with different values, different forms of knowledge, and contentious decisions. There is increasing recognition of the need to train graduate students in interdisciplinary environmental science programs in these issues, which we refer to as “social ethics.” A literature review revealed topics and skills that should be included in such training, as well as potential challenges and barriers. From this revi…Read more
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48The challenges of choosing and explaining a phenomenon in epidemiological research on the “Hispanic Paradox”Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (2): 129-148. 2016.According to public health data, the US Hispanic population is far healthier than would be expected for a population with low socioeconomic status. Ever since Kyriakos Markides and Jeannine Coreil highlighted this in a seminal 1986 article, public health researchers have sought to explain the so-called “Hispanic paradox.” Several candidate explanations have been offered over the years, but the debate goes on. This article offers a philosophical analysis that clarifies how two sets of obstacles m…Read more
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33Bioethics and the Framing of Climate Change's Health RisksBioethics 29 (5): 334-341. 2014.Cheryl Cox MacPherson recently argued, in an article for this journal, that ‘Climate Change is a Bioethics Problem’. This article elaborates on that position, particularly highlighting bioethicists' potential ability to help reframe the current climate change discourse to give more attention to its health risks. This reframing process is especially important because of the looming problem of climate change skepticism. Recent empirical evidence from science framing experiments indicates that the …Read more
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98The mystery of the mystery of common genetic diseasesBiology and Philosophy 25 (2): 183-201. 2010.Common monogenic genetic diseases, ones that have unexpectedly high frequencies in certain populations, have attracted a great number of conflicting evolutionary explanations. This paper will attempt to explain the mystery of why two particularly extensively studied common genetic diseases, Tay Sachs disease and cystic fibrosis, remain evolutionary mysteries despite decades of research. I review the most commonly cited evolutionary processes used to explain common genetic diseases: reproductive …Read more
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84Evolutionary medicine at twenty: rethinking adaptationism and disease (review)Biology and Philosophy 27 (2): 241-261. 2012.Two decades ago, the eminent evolutionary biologist George C. Williams and his physician coauthor, Randolph Nesse, formulated the evolutionary medicine research program. Williams and Nesse explicitly made adaptationism a core component of the new program, which has served to undermine the program ever since, distorting its practitioners’ perceptions of evidentiary burdens and in extreme cases has served to warp practitioner’s understandings of the relationship between evolutionary benefits/detri…Read more
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47Validity and Utility in Biological TraitsBiological Theory 8 (1): 93-102. 2013.“Trait” is a ubiquitous term in biology, but its precise meaning and theoretical foundations remain opaque. After distinguishing between “trait” and “character,” I argue for the value of adopting Theodosius Dobzhansky’s 1956 definition and framework for understanding “trait,” which holds that traits are just “semantic devices” that artificially impose order on continuous biological phenomena. I elaborate on this definition to distinguish between trait validity (compliance with Dobzhansky’s trait…Read more
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19Heterogeneity of Risk within Racial Groups, a Challenge for Public Health ProgramsPreventive Medicine 55 (5): 405-408. 2012.Targeting high-risk populations for public health interventions is a classic tool of public health promotion programs. This practice becomes thornier when racial groups are identified as the at-risk populations. I present the particular ethical and epistemic challenges that arise when there are low-risk subpopulations within racial groups that have been identified as high-risk for a particular health concern. I focus on two examples. The black immigrant population does not have the same hyperten…Read more
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32Lionel Penrose and the concept of normal variation in human intelligenceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 281-289. 2012.Lionel Penrose (1898–1972) was an important leader during the mid-20th century decline of eugenics and the development of modern medical genetics. However, historians have paid little attention to his radical theoretical challenges to mainline eugenic concepts of mental disease. Working from a classification system developed with his colleague, E. O. Lewis, Penrose developed a statistically sophisticated and clinically grounded refutation of the popular position that low intelligence is inherent…Read more
University Of Indiana, Bloomington
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
4 more
Health |
Illness |
Health and Illness |
Disease |
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Genetic Ethics, Misc |
Public Health |
Climate Change |