Below is a selection of published works and works in progress. Please do not quote from drafts posted here.
“Health, Redress, and the Capability Approach”
(single-spaced pdf; double-spaced pdf; double-spaced WORD/.doc file)
This essay explores the relevance of Amartya Sen’s question “Equality of What?” for policy areas related to the various determinants of population health. I first introduce Sen’s capability approach to distributive justice and then explicate the differences between it and rival “resourcist” approaches. Although I offer pointed criticism of extant arguments in favor of the capability approach, I ultimately argue that resourcist objections to capability views can be met by formulating a distributive rule to address them. The idea of justice-mandated concern for fellow citizens is eventually introduced in order to motivate a distributive rule that, when accompanied by a capability metric, combines the theoretical virtues of both resourcist and capability approaches.
“Emergency Contraception and Conscientious Objection”
Journal of Applied Philosophy 27, no. 3 (August 2010): 290-304
(pdf)
Emergency contraception—also known as the morning after pill—is marketed and sold, under various brand names, in over one hundred countries around the world. In some countries, customers can purchase the drug without a prescription. In others, a prescription must be presented to a licensed pharmacist. In virtually all of these countries, pharmacists are the last link in the chain of delivery. This article examines and ultimately rejects several standard moves in the bioethics literature on the right of pharmacists conscientiously to refuse to dispense emergency contraception. Its central thesis is that the standard “moderate” solution to this problem is mistaken. Thus, when all publicly relevant interests are given their due, it is not acceptable to allow refusals in the big city, where pharmacies are plentiful, but forbid them in rural settings, where pharmacies are scarce. Rather, there should be strong public policy requiring that all pharmacists dispense emergency contraception to customers who request it, regardless of pharmacists’ moral or religious objections.
“Justice in Health Care: A Moderate Rawlsian Approach”
In this paper I argue against the two dominant Rawlsian approaches to justice in health care (Daniels’ and Pogge’s) and offer a positive alternative that (in effect) splits the difference between them. I draw on arguments familiar from debates over global justice to establish robust duties of concern between compatriots. Compliance with these duties entails that citizens display special concern for one another’s health needs. Yet my approach does not entail Daniels’ (prima facie) entitlements to full health; nor does it embrace the apparent callousness of Pogge’s position that citizens are not obligated by justice to address one another’s naturally caused health needs.
“Justice and Profound Cognitive Disability”
How are the needs of the profoundly cognitively disabled addressed by the demands of justice? In this essay I explain how one central plank of domestic justice generates reasons to show special concern for a sizeable portion of this disabled population. Although this plank cannot situate the profoundly cognitively disabled directly within the ambit of justice, it can include them indirectly, by virtue of what we owe their parents, whose well-being is intimately bound up with the well-being of their child. This parent-centered approach faces a number of hurdles. I attempt to defuse four worries in particular, namely (1) that it cannot address the needs of abandoned or neglected children, (2) that it treats children as mere means to the well-being of their parents, (3) that it entails equally strong state concern for (e.g.) non-parents’ beloved pets, and (4) that it entails problematic double-counting, as when the state has both direct and indirect reasons to display robust concern for one’s close friend. I conclude that the parent-centered approach offers one genuine reason of domestic justice to address the needs of many profoundly cognitively disabled children.
“Legitimacy and Stability in Rawls’s Political Liberalism”
(pdf)
This paper seeks to correct pervasive misunderstandings of what Rawls means by “legitimacy” and “stability” in his doctrine of political liberalism. I also intend it to be a short reader’s guide to Rawls’s book Political Liberalism.