Research statement:

My research primarily concerns bioethics and moral epistemology. In bioethics, I am primarily interested in the effects that genetic manipulation and biomedical enhancement technologies have on medicine and society, as well as arguments for and against their implementation. In general, I defend moderate views, according to which there are plausible moral explanations as to which manipulations and enhancements are permissible. My views on artificial intelligence in the medical profession are similar. I argue that automating medical tasks risks undermining the implicit trust that patients have in medicine, because trust requires human interaction. Thankfully, this view would still allow many AI systems to be implemented. In bioethics, I have also written on the ethics of informed consent to clinical trials and methods of clinical moral reasoning.My research primarily concerns bioethics and moral epistemology. In bioethics, I am primarily interested in the effects that artificial intelligence and automation technologies would have on the physician-patient relationship. I have argued for a moderate view that holds that automating medical tasks risks undermining the implicit trust that patients have in medicine, because trust requires human interaction. Thankfully, this view would still allow many AI systems to be implemented. I hold similarly moderate views about biomedical manipulation of the human organism. I have also written on the ethics of informed consent to clinical trials and methods of clinical moral reasoning.

In metaethics, my focus is on moral epistemology. My dissertation argues that moral epistemology should adopt a pragmatist notion of moral success, and that this means that moral epistemology needs to pay close attention to the methodologies that it prescribes to agents. The pragmatist perspective I employ is naturalistic in the Quinean tradition, based on a genealogical explication of the nature of moral knowledge, and justified through conceptual engineering. The more practical sections of the dissertation apply the pragmatism that I develop to specific issues, like the foundationalist/coherentist debate, threshold deontology, and clinical moral reasoning (a point at which my two research programs dovetail). On the pragmatist criterion of moral success, part of what makes a theoretical claim successful is that it helps solve a practical moral problem, which means that the practical applications are essential to showing pragmatism’s strengths.

Additionally, I have interests in Rawls, metaphilosophical issues about intuitions, and expressivism.