Diversity Reading List

Abstract: Medical complicity in torture is prohibited by international law and codes of professional ethics. But in the many countries in which torture is common, doctors frequently are expected to assist unethical acts that they are unable to prevent. Sometimes these doctors face a dilemma: they are asked to provide diagnoses or treatments that respond to genuine health needs but that also make further torture more likely or more effective. The duty to avoid complicity in torture then comes into conflict with the doctor's duty to care for patients. Sometimes the right thing for a doctor to do requires complicity in torture. Whether this is the case depends on: the expected consequences of the doctor's actions; the wishes of the patient; and the extent of the doctor's complicity with wrongdoing. Medical associations can support physicians who face this dilemma while maintaining a commitment to clear principles denouncing torture.

Abstract:

This essay is aimed at those moral philosophers who recognize a certain category of negative moral rights, but refuse to recognize a similar category of positive moral rights. That category consists of moral rights normally held by human beings. Such rights may be called "natural moral rights." My thesis is that if there is a natural negative right not to be killed, then -- contra Thomson, Nozick and others -- there must be at least one natural positive right, which might be called a "right not to be allowed to die."

Abstract: Essays on excusing conditions and their correlates, mitigating conditions, usually begin with the assumption that there is general agreement on what the standard excuses are, and on where they are inapplicable. This assumption is justified; criminal law and the history of discussions of excuses have produced accord, though now and then doubts are expressed about particulars. Essays on excuses typically aim not so much to convince one that such-and-such are the general types of excuses but, rather, to show how they work and what their operation reveals about the nature of voluntary acts, full responsibility, etc.

Abstract: My aim in this essay is to defend the claim that posthumous harm is possible against an argument that assumes that an event harms a person only if it makes it the case that his or her welfare diminishes (compared to some benchmark) and further assumes that no one exists after death. This argument gets a purchase against posthumous harm only if one adds what I call Mortality-Bounded Welfare: the thesis that no events that occur after the end of one-s life can detrimentally affect one-s welfare. I accept the first two assumptions with some modification, but provide an argument to reject Mortality-Bounded Welfare. Although I use an argument form familiar in these kinds of discussions -- contrast cases in a thought-experiment, one involving an undeniably living person, and one not -- my defense of the thesis that the boundaries of welfare-affecting events may extend beyond the existence of the person in question is novel. My strategy is to make a case for a human condition having residual boundaries, by which I mean that it may obtain because of events that postdate a person, and then argue that it affects welfare. In the course of my argument, I provide a subsidiary argument that rights have residual boundaries. In particular, I argue that once rights vest (in existing people), they delineate not only a sphere of behavior that satisfies the rights but also a sphere of rights-violating behavior on the part of others. Unless this delineation is defeated by moral means, actual behavior on the part of others that falls within the respective spheres is right-satisfying or right-violating. The story does not change with regard to a right to performances potentially or necessarily postdating the right-holder. Unlike some attempts to argue that posthumous harm is possible, my defense of the possibility of posthumous harm is compatible with various metaphysical positions about when a posthumous harm occurs. I go on to demonstrate that my thought-experiment argument is free of an important objection (raised by Taylor, 2005) to two well-known attempts to defend posthumous harm on the basis of thought-experiments, Parfit-s (1984) and Feinberg-s (1984). For the sake of completeness, I sketch a different thought-experiment argument against Mortality-Bounded Welfare. I explain why this different thought-experiment does not make use of the idea of rights with residual boundaries. In closing, I trace a recent attempt, grounded in our agency, to argue for the possibility of posthumous harm. This attempt accepts, as mine does, the assumptions about welfare diminution and nonexistence after death and is likewise compatible with various metaphysical positions about when posthumous harm occurs. The argument in question is provided by Keller (2004) and is compatible with analyses of welfare offered by Scanlon and Raz. Although I grant its underlying assumption that agency sometimes has a posthumous extension, I argue that my defense of the possibility of posthumous harm is superior to this one by expanding on a recent criticism of its position on welfare offered by Bradley (2007).

Abstract:
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 social difference, including race, gender, class, and ability. Our account uses political philosophy and cognitive science to give a theoretical basis for understanding materialized oppression, explaining how artifacts encode and carry oppressive ideas from the past to the present and future. Oppressive medical devices present a moral aggregation problem. To remedy this problem, we suggest redundantly layered solutions that are coordinated to disrupt reciprocal causal connections between the attitudes, practices, and artifacts of oppressive systems.

Abstract:
I first distinguish promises with positive sexual content (e.g., promises to perform sexual acts) and promises with negative sexual content (e.g., promises to refrain from sexual acts—as one does when making monogamy promises). I argue that sexual content—even positive sexual content—does not cause a promise to misfire. However, the content of some successful promises is such that a promisee ought not to accept the promise, and, if she does accept, she ought then to release her promisor from the promise. I argue that both positive and negative sexual promises have content of this kind.

Abstract: What should we do about “tainted” public commemorations? Recent events have highlighted the urgency of reaching a consensus on this question. However, existing discussions appear to be dominated by two naïve opposing views – to remove or preserve them. My aims in this essay are two-fold. First, I argue that the two views are not naïve, but undergirded by concerns with securing self-respect and with the character of our engagement with the past. Second, I offer a qualified defence of vandalising tainted commemorations. The defence comprises two parts. I consider two prominent suggestions – to install counter-commemorations and to add contextualising plaques – and argue that they are typically beset with difficulties. I then argue that in some circumstances, constrained vandalism is a response to tainted commemorations which effectively adjudicates the demands of the two opposing views

Abstract:
In pre-Qin Chinese canonical texts, the supreme ideal figure with impeccable virtue and wisdom is usually referred to as the Sage (sheng 聖 or shengren 聖人). The Zhuangzi, however, is an exception. In this famous Daoist text, the supreme ideal has been referred to, in different contexts, as a Perfect Person (zhiren, 至人), a Daemonic Person (shenren, 神人), or an Authentic Person (zhenren, 真人), in addition to the Sage. Most scholars, when discussing the meanings of these terms, treat them as synonyms used by the author(s) of the Zhuangzi to designate the same figure. Very few scholars believe that they refer to four different types of ideal figures with different levels of perfection. In this article, I will first focus on depictions of the Sage, the Perfect Person, the Daemonic Person, and the Authentic Person in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi to see whether they are used by the author to refer to the same or four different levels of a supreme ideal figure. I will then move on to discuss Zhuangzi’s art of writing as manifested in these depictions. The interpretive strategy I adopt is that of close reading with an eye to addressing the larger issues around the Inner Chapters in early Chinese culture.

Abstract: Many have asked how and why feminist theory makes a distinctive contribution to bioethics. In this essay, I outline two ways in which feminist reflection can enrich bioethical studies. First, feminist theory may expose certain themes of androcentric reasoning that can affect, in sometimes crude but often subtle ways, the substantive analysis of topics in bioethics; second, it can unearth the gendered nature of certain basic philosophical concepts that form the working tools of ethical theory.

Abstract: In this article, I urge that mainstream discussions of abortion are dissatisfying in large part because they proceed in polite abstraction from the distinctive circumstances and meanings of gestation. Such discussions, in fact, apply to abortion conceptual tools that were designed on the premiss that people are physically demarcated, even as gestation is marked by a thorough-going intertwinement. We cannot fully appreciate what is normatively at stake with legally forcing continued gestation, or again how to discuss moral responsibilities to continue gestating, until we appreciate in their own terms the goods and evils distinctive of gestational connection. To underscore the need to explore further the meanings of gestation, I provide two examples of the difference it might make to legal and moral discussions of abortion if we appreciate more fully that gestation is an intimacy.