Who matters, and why? What, if anything, makes human beings morally special? What do our evaluations of what makes us unique entail for our obligations to one another? My philosophical research focuses on these foundational questions, problematizes traditional ways of conceptualizing them, and offers alternative answers.

I am a moral philosopher and mixed-methods researcher who uses questions about health, disability, and bioethics to rethink foundational questions in ethical and social theory. My theoretical commitments are broadly virtue ethical. My work encompasses four, interconnected lines of inquiry: (1) moral status; (2) capacity and communication; (3) bio- and neuroethics; and (4) the emotional, political, and social contexts of health and (dis)ability. I have published on the ways that evaluations of the presence or absence of status-conferring attributes have very real practical consequences, and continue to pursue my own argument for a novel view of the grounds for moral status in my current book project, ‘Love without language’.

My empirical projects engage qualitative and quantitative methodologies to improve health outcomes via conceptual means. Ongoing projects include: (1) a survey of active US board-certified physicians on their attitudes towards, experiences with, and needs serving intellectually and developmentally disabled patients; (2) the promise applying virtue ethical frameworks to research and medical education might have for overcoming what my collaborator, Ian Peebles, has termed ‘insufficient goodwill’; (3) a systematic review on the potential empirical (as opposed to moral) value of diverse participant engagement in clinical trials; (4) an assessment of degrees of functional capacities of neural networks derived from human stem cell donors, as compared to their demographic markers; and (5) a cross-disciplinary systematic review of the meaning of ‘consciousness’ deployed in an effort to develop policy related to AI and organoid intelligence.

Philosophical interests

Philosophy of health, medicine, and (dis)ability

A central question of my research has to do with the nature of interpersonal relationships between non-speaking individuals with severe to profound intellectual disability and those with whom they share their lives. I have broadened this interest to include other non-speaking entities, including non-human animals, ecological entities, and various groups of marginalized people unable to “speak” due to oppressive power structures. A core philosophical contribution I am currently working on is what I term “relationship-constituted and constituting meaningful expressions,” a morally saturated but ubiquitous form of communication particularly salient for those who cannot speak.

I’m always thinking about the philosophy of health and medicine, particularly medical and research ethics, the relationship between health and (dis)ability, and the connections between mental health, well-being, and flourishing.

Other interests within this domain include a project on the nature of advocacy and informal political representation for non-speaking entities; a work-in-progress on Master Narratives of intellectual disability; and a paper on the permissibility and fittingness of pity and compassion felt by the non-disabled towards the disabled.

My interest is inspired by my very cool younger brother, Travis, who has been diagnosed with a profound intellectual disability.

Bio- and Neuroethics

Moral philosophy

My background is in ethical thought. A longtime virtue ethics sympathist, I spend a lot of time thinking about moral character development, what we owe one another with respect to our interpersonal relationships, and how face-to-face interaction shapes what we think of ourselves and others.

In my book project, I defend a view of moral status grounded in the capacity to communicate to develop and deepen relationships. This capacity, I argue, is social, bi-directional, and presupposes the same capacity in others. It successfully encompasses all human beings, including the most “extreme,” typically excluded cases, including human beings with the most profound forms of disability. The book begins with two historically-oriented chapters on what I take to be extensionally inadequate theories of moral status, or extensionally adequate yet inegalitarian ones. It will then present my positive view of the grounds for moral status and the communicative capacity central to that grounding. The latter half of my book will grapple with challenges that include human fetuses, non-human animals, and ecological entities, as well as the political and social implications of my view. It will close with a sketch of what my argument implies for topics like advocacy and political representation for non-speaking entities by centering the role of those with preexisting relationships with such entities: persons that I suggested can function as friends-in-common between the non-speaking entity and others. While I rely predominantly upon moral theory, bioethics, and philosophy of disability as my theoretical backdrops, my work is empirically grounded by a range of sources. I plan to continue work on this monograph over the next two years, with a targeted completion date of late summer 2025.

Philosophy of biology

I have an interest in philosophy of biology, especially where it intersects with concerns regarding disability, philosophy of medicine, and/or the potential contributions of philosophical methodologies to public health and precision health.

I am interested in pluralistic expansions of evolutionary theory, especially epigenetics (inspired by Jablonka and Lamb’s work on the subject); neuroplasticity and its implications for our understandings of autism and other non-neurotypical cognitive modes; and other dimensions of connection between philosophy of biology and neuroethics.

My epistemological concerns are typically normatively motivated with ethical questions at their roots. For example, a driving consideration of my dissertation was what moral duties we have with respect to our epistemic activity, particularly when that activity has to do with what we take ourselves to know about those dramatically unlike ourselves.

Mixed-method and grant-funded research

1. Organoid intelligence (NSF grant under review)

2. Virtue ethics in medical school curricula (with Ian Peebles)

   Dr. Ian Peebles and I assess shortcomings in goodwill corresponding to healthcare outcome disparities in a paper currently under revision. We identify medical school education and ongoing professional education as promising spaces to combat implicit bias and enable upstream, improved outcomes for certain patient groups. We are now developing a larger-scale ongoing project in which we track the connection between medical school ethics curricula and outcome for these patient groups. We plan to develop a pilot curriculum that integrates the philosophical school of virtue ethics, an ethical tradition largely absent from current curricula, which we hypothesize might amend some of the problems we identify in our paper.

3. Surveying Clinician attitudes towards intellectually disabled patient populations

   The goal of this project is to improve healthcare outcomes for intellectually disabled patients. While previous studies have surveyed (and found alarming results regarding) clinician attitudes towards and comfort levels serving disabled patients as a whole (see VanPuymbrouck et al., Iezzoni et al.), no studies have selectively investigated clinician awareness of intellectual disability. This survey is an initial step towards developing interventions to aid healthcare workers serving intellectually disabled populations.