Jasmine Gunkel

I received my PhD in philosophy from the University of Southern California (USC), supervised by Mark Schroeder. I'm currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, in the Department of Bioethics. Afterwards, I'll be joining the Philosophy Department at the University of Western Ontario as an Assistant Professor. I work primarily in normative and applied ethics (especially on bioethics, AI, and animal ethics), social and political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Though I have many unconnected side-projects (which you can read about on my research page), the bulk of my work these days centers around intimacy.

Why are some violations of bodily autonomy, such as forcing someone to continue a pregnancy, so much more severe than others, such as requiring that someone wear a mask? Why is it worse for a stranger to grab our butt than it is for them to grab our forearm? Why are some sorts of medical care, like therapy or gynecology, more likely to be sensitive than others? What does sex work share in common with nursing, teaching, and creating art, and how can we better and more fairly regulate all of them? Why is AI such an insufficient solution to the epidemic of loneliness? On the surface, these questions don’t seem to share much in common. My work argues that understanding intimacy helps us answer all of them.

I've developed what I call the Intimate Zones Account. I argue that we best understand intimacy's scope and importance not by first looking to where its most apparent to us, i.e. in intimate relationships, but by first looking to features of our persons and building out from there. I argue that intimacy exposes features that are important for how we see ourselves and that we're generally disposed to hide. These criteria together, I argue, make for a particular sort of psychological vulnerability, a vulnerability that explains why intimate violations are so serious, and grounds many of our most stringent rights and duties. 

Understanding the shape of this vulnerability, as well as the particular ways intimacy is good for us, helps me generate concrete policy proposals in a wide variety of areas, from medicine to sex work to the arts to AI design.