Georgetown University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2014
Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics
Normative Ethics
  • Responsible Pain Medicine
    with D. Manoharan and V. V. Altiery De Jesus
    In Ezio Di Nucci, Ji-Young Lee & Isaac A. Wagner (eds.), The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Bioethics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.
  •  20
    Contributory Reasons For and Against Procreation
    Environmental Ethics 45 (3): 287-293. 2023.
    Procreative limitarians, according to Kalle Grill, believe that we—especially the globally wealthy—should limit our procreative behaviors in order to reduce our impact on the natural environment. However, according to Grill, limitarians tend not to perform a complete moral analysis of procreating, as they cite the costs without noting the substantial benefits. In particular, Grill argues that procreation has benefits that consumption lacks, which is relevant for deciding where to focus in our ef…Read more
  •  11
    A warm, personal guide to building a strong ethical and moral compass in the midst of today's confusing, scary, global problems. The moral challenges of today are unfamiliar in the history of philosophy. Climate change is the paradigm example of what Travis Rieder calls "The Puzzle" in the way your choices can seem at odds with what the planet urgently needs. How do we decide the right thing to do in the face of a massive collective challenge? Should you drink water from a plastic bottle or not?…Read more
  •  3542
    Population Engineering and the Fight against Climate Change
    Social Theory and Practice 42 (4): 845-870. 2016.
    Contrary to political and philosophical consensus, we argue that the threats posed by climate change justify population engineering, the intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations. Specifically, we defend three types of policies aimed at reducing fertility rates: choice enhancement, preference adjustment, and incentivization. While few object to the first type of policy, the latter two are generally rejected because of their potential for coercion or morally objectio…Read more
  •  685
    Several philosophers have recently argued that policies aimed at reducing human fertility are a practical and morally justifiable way to mitigate the risk of dangerous climate change. There is a powerful objection to such “population engineering” proposals: even if drastic fertility reductions are needed to prevent dangerous climate change, implementing those reductions would wreak havoc on the global economy, which would seriously undermine international antipoverty efforts. In this article, we…Read more
  •  5
    Green prescribing is good, but patients do not have a duty to accept it
    Journal of Medical Ethics 49 (2): 104-105. 2023.
    Joshua Parker’s article on green inhaler prescribing is important and timely. I agree with much of it, specifically regarding the institutional duty to make climate-friendly changes (from environmentally expensive prescriptions to ‘greener,’ similarly effective ones). The challenge, however, comes in determining how that institutional obligation impacts the rights and duties of patients. In this commentary, I want to offer a friendly alternative to Parker’s view of individual patient obligation,…Read more
  •  13
    Why the World Needs Bioethics Communication
    with Lauren Arora Hutchinson and Jeffrey P. Kahn
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 65 (4): 629-636. 2022.
    ABSTRACT:This essay argues for the importance of formalizing public engagement efforts around bioethics as something we might call "bioethics communication," and it outlines the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics' plans for engaging in this effort. Because science is complex and difficult to explain to nonexperts, the field of science communication has arisen to meet this need. The field involves both a practice and a subject of empirical research. Like science, bioethics is also comple…Read more
  •  11
    Moral Reasons for Individuals in High-Income Countries to Limit Beef Consumption
    with Jessica Fanzo, Rebecca McLaren, Ruth Faden, Justin Bernstein, and Anne Barnhill
    Food Ethics 7 (2): 1-27. 2022.
    This paper argues that individuals in many high-income countries typically have moral reasons to limit their beef consumption and consume plant-based protein instead, given the negative effects of beef production and consumption. Beef production is a significant source of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, high levels of beef consumption are associated with health risks, and some cattle production systems raise animal welfare concerns. These negative effects m…Read more
  •  22
    Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 274-282, March 2022.
  •  50
    Brian Earp and his colleagues argue in this issue’s target article that racial justice requires ending the War on Drugs. In this they are absolutely correct. Indeed, de...
  •  8
    From the Issue Co-Editors
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 30 (3). 2020.
    It is with great pleasure and a sense of urgency that we present this KIEJ double issue on ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheer range of ethical concerns raised by the pandemic, combined with the speed with which these problems emerged, is staggering and unprecedented in our generation. We have tried to give space to papers that raise immediately pressing ethical issues that have not received much discussion in popular media. Topics range from fundamental questions about how…Read more
  •  51
    Many of us believe that we can and do have individual obligations to refrain from contributing to massive collective harms – say, from producing luxury greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; however, our individual actions are so small as to be practically meaningless. Can we then, justify the intuition that we ought to refrain? In this paper, we argue that this debate may have been mis-framed. Rather than investigating whether or not we have obligations to refrain from contributing to collective actio…Read more
  •  33
    Among those who discuss America's opioid crisis, it is popular to claim that we know what we, as a society, ought to do to solve the problem—we simply don't want it badly enough. We don't lack knowledge; we lack the will to act and to fund the right policies. In fact, I've heard two versions of this. Among those who focus on prescription opioids, it is clear that we ought to stop prescribing so many powerful opioid painkillers. And among my public health colleagues focusing on illicit drug use, …Read more
  •  21
    Does Health Promotion Harm the Environment?
    with Cheryl C. Macpherson and Elise Smith
    The New Bioethics 26 (2): 158-175. 2020.
    Health promotion involves social and environmental interventions designed to benefit and protect health. It often harmfully impacts the environment through air and water pollution, medical waste, g...
  •  8
    Editor’s Note
    Project Muse®: Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal - Latest Articles 30 (1). 2020.
    I’m thrilled to write my first Editor’s Note in Dr. Kukla’s absence and grateful that they entrusted the journal to me while on their sabbatical. This first issue under my editorship comprises three nuanced, careful looks at how to ethically evaluate practices that can have significant effects on the well-being of vulnerable populations.In this issue’s featured article, “Contextual Injustice,” Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa considers two cases that have clear relevance for our moment: Dora, who ident…Read more
  •  82
    Why I’m still a proportionalist
    Philosophical Studies 173 (1): 251-270. 2016.
    Mark Schroeder has, rather famously, defended a powerful Humean Theory of Reasons. In doing so, he abandons what many take to be the default Humean view of weighting reasons—namely, proportionalism. On Schroeder’s view, the pressure that Humeans feel to adopt proportionalism is illusory, and proportionalism is unable to make sense of the fact that the weight of reasons is a normative matter. He thus offers his own ‘Recursive View’, which directly explains how it is that the weight of reasons is …Read more
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  •  19
    Pain Medicine During an Opioid Epidemic Needs More Transparency, Not Less
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (3): 183-185. 2018.
    Nada Gligorov (2018), in this issue’s target article, covers a lot of ground concerning the science and ethics of pain management. I find substantial chunks of her argument compelling, including he...
  •  39
    Neonatal intensive care units represent simultaneously one of the great success stories of modern medicine, and one of its most controversial developments. One particularly controversial issue is the resuscitation of extremely preterm infants. Physicians in the United States generally accept that they are required to resuscitate infants born as early as 25 weeks and that it is permissible to resuscitate as early as 22 weeks. In this article, I question the moral pressure to resuscitate by critic…Read more
  •  84
    Procreation, Adoption and the Contours of Obligation
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 32 (3): 293-309. 2014.
    The goal of this article is to evaluate the defensibility of wide-spread beliefs concerning the moral value of procreating. Very many of us are ‘pro-natal’ — that is, we have a positive moral view of making more people — but pro-natalism is under serious threat. In particular, I argue that combining several arguments in procreative ethics generates a powerful case for the Anti-Natal Pro-Adoption View, or the view that we are obligated not to procreate, but instead to satisfy any parenting desire…Read more
  •  37
    How to Solve Prichard's Dilemma: A Comlex Contractualist Account of Moral Motivation
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (1): 1-19. 2015.
    T. M. Scanlon’s contractualist account of morality is articulated alongside and built upon groundbreaking work on moral motivation. According to Scanlon, the central challenge of providing an account of moral motivation is navigating “Prichard’s Dilemma,” which requires that an account be both helpfully explanatory and morally relevant. Scanlon’s own solution is that one has a reason to act rightly because doing so is an aspect of living with others on terms they could accept. There is much to l…Read more
  •  89
    One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? by Sarah Conly
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 26 (2): 29-34. 2016.
    There are too many people on the planet. This isn’t a popular thing to say, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s true, and that we need to do something to address it. Even in our radically unjust world, where billions of people do not have adequate access to food, water, energy, and other resources, we’re still living unsustainably—overcharging our ecological credit card and torching the climate. But discussing the link between these environmental problems and the population is unco…Read more