I work in political philosophy and bioethics. I'm particularly interested in their intersections. Lately I've gotten interested in some questions about the place of bodies in an account of morality and justice. Where do our rights to our bodies and body parts come from? What makes my body 'mine', anyway - that it is me, or that I somehow own it? How are body rights like, and unlike, rights in personal property? For instance, can we 'acquire' bodily rights - in prosthetics, for instance, -or are these necessarily 'innate'? When and why are others obligated to help us transform our bodies? Only when we are sick, or also for the sake of allowing…
I work in political philosophy and bioethics. I'm particularly interested in their intersections. Lately I've gotten interested in some questions about the place of bodies in an account of morality and justice. Where do our rights to our bodies and body parts come from? What makes my body 'mine', anyway - that it is me, or that I somehow own it? How are body rights like, and unlike, rights in personal property? For instance, can we 'acquire' bodily rights - in prosthetics, for instance, -or are these necessarily 'innate'? When and why are others obligated to help us transform our bodies? Only when we are sick, or also for the sake of allowing diverse bodies to better navigate a world designed with normality in mind?
I've also spent a lot of time thinking about disability, starting with the relevance of disability for 'cooperation' theories of egalitarian justice. What should we say about the claims of those who cannot contribute? To what extent are ability and disability socially constructed? How does this matter, for purposes of distributive justice? More generally how does the fact that people have diverse bodies matter for political philosophy? This leads to broader question about the nature of disability and human diversity: what is it do be disabled? What does it have to do with health, and our practices of talking about health?
