•  25
    Oppressive Medical Objects and Spaces: Response to Commentaries
    American Journal of Bioethics 24 (4). 2024.
    In “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies”, we show how oppression can be inscribed in medical devices. We consider oximeters and spirometers, drawing heavily on the work of anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas and historian Lundy Braun. Both devices encode racial biases: oximeters because they do not correct for race, and spirometers because they do. We zoom out from these particular devices to examine a wide range of tools and technologies, and we build a theoretical framework t…Read more
  •  271
    Malicious Moral Envy
    In Sara Protasi (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Envy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 129-146. 2022.
    Malicious moral envy is an aversive reaction to a rival’s moral properties or accomplishments, accompanied by a tendency to level-down the target by morally tarnishing or sabotaging them. In this essay I give an account of malicious moral envy, showing how it is a sub-type of envy more generally. I describe Donald Trump’s behaviors toward Barack Obama and Anthony Fauci as a case study of malicious moral envy. I argue that malicious moral envy is puzzling, first because it is self-defeating, and …Read more
  •  970
    Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies
    American Journal of Bioethics 23 (4): 9-23. 2023.
    It is well-known that racism is encoded into the social practices and institutions of medicine. Less well-known is that racism is encoded into the material artifacts of medicine. We argue that many medical devices are not merely biased, but materialize oppression. An oppressive device exhibits a harmful bias that reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations. Using pulse oximeters and spirometers as case studies, we show how medical devices can materialize oppression along various axes of soci…Read more
  •  439
    Materializing Systemic Racism, Materializing Health Disparities
    American Journal of Bioethics 21 (9): 16-18. 2021.
    The purpose of cultural competence education for medical professionals is to ensure respectful care and reduce health disparities. Yet as Berger and Miller (2021) show, the cultural competence framework is dated, confused, and self-defeating. They argue that the framework ignores the primary driver of health disparities—systemic racism—and is apt to exacerbate rather than mitigate bias and ethnocentrism. They propose replacing cultural competence with a framework that attends to two social aspec…Read more
  •  81
    Sacrifice and Relational Well-Being
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (3): 335-353. 2018.
    The well-being account of sacrifice says that sacrifices are gross losses of well-being. This account is attractive because it explains the relationship between sacrifice and moral obligation. However, sacrifices made on behalf of loved ones may cause trouble for the account. Loving sacrifices occur in a context where the agent’s well-being and the beneficiary’s well-being are intertwined. They present a challenge to individualism about well-being. Drawing inspiration from feminist philosophers …Read more
  •  531
    Social Constraints On Moral Address
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 167-189. 2017.
    The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifica…Read more
  •  15
    If Health Care Advertising Is a Problem, FDA-Style Regulation Is Not the Solution
    American Journal of Bioethics 14 (3): 46-47. 2014.
    In “The Ethics of Advertising for Health Care Services” (2014), Schenker, Arnold, and London argue that advertisements for physicians, hospitals, and other health care services are morally problematic and ought to be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as it regulates prescription drug ads. I argue that the regulation of prescription drug ads has been so ineffective that, if the harms of health care service ads are similar to the harms of drug ads, such regulation is bound to fai…Read more
  •  292
    What We Know and What We Owe
    Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 3. 2013.
    Knowledge is necessary for certain moral obligations. In learning something new, one sometimes triggers a moral obligation. This paper argues that the existence of these knowledge-based obligations poses a problem for the view that we are not only free to choose the course of our own lives, including our careers and personal projects, but also free to change our minds and quit at any time to pursue something else. For if our choice of life path has generated knowledge-based moral obligations tha…Read more
  •  129
    Sacrifices of Self
    The Journal of Ethics 19 (1): 53-72. 2015.
    We emerge from certain activities with an altered sense of self. Whether returning from a warzone or from an experience as common as caring for an aging parent, one might remark, “I’m not the same person I was.” I argue that such transformations are relevant to debates about what morality requires of us. To undergo an alteration in one’s self is to make a special kind of sacrifice, a sacrifice of self. Since projects can be more or less morally obligatory to the extent that they require more or …Read more
  •  3
    Differential Demands
    In Marcel van Ackeren & Michael Kuhler (eds.), The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can, Routledge. pp. 36-50. 2015.
    If the traditional problem of demandingness is that a theory demands too much of all agents, for example by asking them to maximize utility in every decision, then we should ask whether there is a related problem of “differential demandingness”, when a theory places vastly different demands on different agents. I argue that even according to common-sense morality, the demands faced by particular agents depend on a variety of contingent factors. These include the general circumstances, the compli…Read more
  •  70
    Amnesia, Anesthesia, and Warranted Fear
    Bioethics 28 (5): 245-254. 2012.
    Is a painful experience less bad for you if you will not remember it? Do you have less reason to fear it? These questions bear on how we think about medical procedures and surgeries that use an anesthesia regimen that leaves patients conscious – and potentially in pain – but results in complete ‘drug-induced amnesia’ after the fact. I argue that drug-induced amnesia does not render a painful medical procedure a less fitting object of fear, and thus the prospect of amnesia does not give patients …Read more
  •  310
    The ratcheting-up effect
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (2): 228-254. 2012.
    I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure …Read more
  •  362
    How to Put Prescription Drug Ads on Your Syllabus
    Teaching Philosophy 37 (3): 295-319. 2014.
    The purpose of this essay is to make the case that the ethical issues raised by the current U.S. practice of direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising are worthy of study in philosophy courses, and to provide instructors with some ideas for how they might approach teaching the topic, despite the current relative scarcity of philosophical literature published on it. This topic presents a unique opportunity to cover ground in ethics, critical thinking, and scientific literacy simultaneously…Read more
  •  548
    De dicto desires and morality as fetish
    Philosophical Studies 163 (2): 459-477. 2013.
    Abstract   It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto . If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling.…Read more
  •  1131
    What moral saints look like
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3). 2009.
    Susan Wolf famously claimed that the life of the moral saint is unattractive from the “point of view of individual perfection.” I argue, however, that the unattractive moral saints in Wolf’s account are self-defeating on two levels, are motivated in the wrong way, and are called into question by real-life counter-examples. By appealing to a real-life case study, I argue that the best life from the moral point of view is not necessarily unattractive from the individual point of view.
  •  18
    Interactive capacity, decisional capacity, and a dilemma for surrogates
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 4 (4): 36-37. 2013.
    In “Conscientious of the Conscious: Interactive Capacity as a Threshold Marker for Consciousness” (2013), Fischer and Truog argue that recent studies showing that some patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are in fact in a minimally conscious state raise various ethical questions for clinicians and family members. I argue that these findings raise a further ethical dilemma about how and whether to seek the involvement of the minimally conscious person herself in decisions about her c…Read more