Some Recent Publications
"What is Intimacy?" (2024). Journal of Philosophy 121(8).
Why is it typically more violating to grab someone’s thigh or to stroke their face than it is to grab their finger? Why is it worse to read someone’s dream journal without permission than it is to read their bird watching field notes? Intimacy, I argue, is key to understanding these cases, and to explaining many of our most stringent rights.
I present two ways of thinking about intimacy, Relationship-First Accounts and the Intimate Zones Account. I argue that only the Intimate Zones Account lets us cohesively understand intimacy’s importance, and the scope of our intimate rights. I characterize our intimate zones as meeting the Hiddenness and Importance Conditions, and show how a feature’s meeting these conditions makes it a locus of special vulnerability by which our persons can be fundamentally altered. This special vulnerability explains why we must respect the intimate boundaries of others.
The Overlooked Risk of Intimate Violation in Research (2024). American Journal of Bioethics 24(4).
There are few moral principles less controversial than “don’t touch people’s private parts without consent.” Though the principle doesn’t make explicit that there are exceptions, there clearly are some. Parents must wipe their infants. If an unconscious patient is admitted to the emergency room with a profusely bleeding laceration on their genitals, a doctor must give them stitches. The researchers who proposed the study in question, which would look for a connection between burn patients’ microbiomes and their clinical outcomes, presumably believed they had identified an additional exception to the aforementioned principle. I argue that they did not. Rather, because of their tremendous inherent risks, we ought only to perform intimate procedures on those who can’t consent when the procedure is for their own good. Intimate violations have been overlooked in both philosophy and medicine. Because of this, we have lacked an adequate conceptual framework for identifying certain kinds of harms research can inflict. When we understand these special risks, we see that the IRB was right to deny a waiver of consent.
Intimacy, Vulnerability, and the Imperfect Art of Patient-Centered Self-Disclosure (forthcoming). Annals of Family Medicine.
During the vulnerable, painful time around my diagnosis with a chronic illness, my physician shared with me a story from her own life. Her act of self-disclosure was profoundly impactful, reminding me that the gulf between myself and other people was not as vast as it felt. In this essay, I share my story and the conclusions I’ve drawn from it in the years since, using my tools as a philosopher and bioethicist. I explore what “patient-centered self-disclosure” might look like. I hope that these reflections might deepen our understanding of the intimacy and vulnerability of receiving medical care, and of the power of physician self-disclosure.
Xenotransplantation: Injustice, Harm, and Alternatives for Addressing the Organ Crisis (forthcoming). Hastings Center Report.
Jasmine Gunkel and Franklin G. Miller
Xenotransplantation is increasingly touted as the solution to the organ crisis. Some bioethicists, however, have raised concerns about xenotransplantation’s implications for health justice and animal welfare. We develop and sharpen these worries, and explore how they might be mitigated. We compare xenotransplantation with several alternatives for addressing the organ crisis, including directing more money to public health interventions, and argue that these alternatives are ethically preferable. In light of this, we argue that xenotransplantation is not a justifiable method of addressing the organ crisis. Societal funds and attention ought instead be directed towards more efficient and ethically superior solutions.
"Pleasures of the Flesh" (2023). Social Theory and Practice 49(1):79-103.
I give an argument for veganism by drawing parallels between a) bestiality and animal fighting, and b) animal product consumption. Attempts to draw principled distinctions between the practices fail. The wrong-making features of bestiality and animal fighting are also found in animal product consumption. These parallels give us insight into why popular objections to veganism, such as the Inefficacy Argument, are inadequate. Because it is often difficult to enact significant life changes, I hope that seeing the parallels between animal product consumption and acts we are already so strongly motivated to avoid can help us abstain from animal products.
"Intimacy, Illness, and Forced Gestation" (2022). Blog of the APA.
In this piece of public philosophy, I discuss how illness can force us into intimacy. Drawing on both my research and my personal experience, I argue that this forced intimate exposure is an important and overlooked harm of illness. In light of the fall of Roe v. Wade, I then turn towards parallels with forced gestation. I argue that forced gestation forces a pregnant person into at least three different kinds of intimacy. This forced intimacy makes forced gestation a grave wrong.
Some Works in Progress
Intimate Rights, Shame, and Self-Shaping
In this paper, I show why there exists a special class of intimate rights. I aim to reveal why intimacy is so powerful, why intimate violations are so serious, and why our duties to respect the intimate boundaries of others are so strict. This provides a unifying account of the wrong of sexual assault, forced gestation, reading someone’s medical records or diary without consent, and sharing a friend’s secret.
I argue that intimacy is liable to shape us in autonomy-defying ways because it subjects us to the risk of shame. Not only is shame deeply painful, but it can warp us. Shame can not only undermine some individual decision we make (‘Decision-Warping’) but can change the very self who makes decisions (‘Self-Warping’) and undercut our belief that our self is the equal of others (‘Standing-Warping’). I show how these risks combine in different ways with ‘chosen intimacy’, due to the role of trust in our decisions to be intimate, and ‘unchosen intimacy’ due to a compounding of lack of control.
I disambiguate two sets of intimate duties, duties we have to avoid inflicting unwanted intimacy and duties that arise when intimacy occurs. I demonstrate how we can ‘scaffold against shame’ to best protect those who reveal their intimate zones to us. It is my hope that these investigations will not only provide a philosophical foundation for the robust legal and social protections of our intimate rights, but will also help us to do intimacy better.
Intimate Labor
What do sex work, surrogacy, therapy, nursing, nannying, acting, surgery, and home-repair have in common? I argue that they are all intimate labor, this is a distinct and helpful categorization, and that intimacy comes with special risks. I present my ‘Intimate Zones Account’ of the nature of intimacy, and show how it illuminates why this sort of labor makes involved parties importantly vulnerable. I argue that intimate labor exposes hidden, identity-related features. This makes exposed parties vulnerable to having their core persons altered by mechanisms that subvert their rational decision making. We’ll see how this gives us new insight into old arguments about sexual and reproductive labor, such as those making reference to commodification and threats to autonomy.
I identity four different ‘vulnerability models’ we find in intimate labor, and propose a set of policies to regulate them all, some of which will require a radical restructuring of our practices. These policies are responsive to the special way intimacy makes us vulnerable, rather than mere prejudice. I examine and defend the (perhaps counterintuitive!) results of these proposals for disciplines such as theatre.
AI, Pseudointimacy, and Why Intimacy Matters
This paper centers around three questions. 1) Is it possible to be intimate with AI, or is it mere ‘pseudointimacy’? What, if anything, turns on this distinction? 2) Is designing systems that seem able to be intimate a good thing? Would an intimate utopia allow for or even require their use? 3) How ought we to design and regulate AI in light of the answers to 1 and 2? In exploring these questions, I (more loftily) also hope to shed some new light on intimacy’s value, better positioning us to both address the loneliness crisis and relate to each other well.
I propose five principles for designing AI companions. These include (1) training systems to “scaffold against shame,” (2) being transparent so users are aware interactions are only pseudointimate, avoiding overreliance by (3) building in purposeful educational features and (4) facilitating interactions with persons, and (5) limiting user controls to lower the risk of exporting unrealistic relationship standards.
"Do I Really Have to Say 'Feed Two Birds with One Scone'?" (Under Review)
Many found PETA’s Anti-Animal Language campaign, with its comparison of Anti-Animal Language to racist, homophobic, and ableist language, both hysterical and deeply misguided. I argue that even though some Anti-Animal Language shouldn’t be used because of tangible harms it causes, there is a much stronger case against racist, homophobic, ableist, and sexist language. Prominent accounts of the badness of slurs, which I extend to the wider category of ‘Prejudicial Language’, cannot sufficiently explain this difference.
To address this gap, I introduce my ‘Valuing Status Account.’ Because it is deeply important to most humans to have our moral status acknowledged, and required for our acting autonomously, using language that disrespects our status is wrong apart from downstream effects. This underlies the difference between dehumanization, and a novel concept I call ‘deanimalization.’ This gives insight into how ideology functions, and the differing constraints on activism done for animals and humans. This account helps fill in prominent accounts of the badness of slurs, and gets down to a more fundamental explanatory level. I also believe it can help us move away from focusing solely on slurs, and onto the broader category of Prejudicial Language, allowing us to recognize more subtly disrespectful language too.
"Having Your Porn and Equality Too"
Many feminists argue that pornography subordinates and silences women. I introduce a novel theoretical framework to show that alternative pornography can address these harms by changing what mainstream pornography communicates. The background presuppositions required to make sense of pornography are context-dependent. By exposing us to a wide variety of sexual acts, dynamics, and bodies, alternative pornography changes our context. When we understand the diversity of sexual desire, we can’t make sense of a scene in which a woman is submissive by presupposing anything about what women, as a class, like. We instead have to use presuppositions about what the depicted individual likes.
While this is reminiscent of ‘More Speech’ approaches to addressing hate speech, it actually reveals weaknesses of the ‘More Speech’ approach. While ‘More Porn’ alters the content of mainstream pornography, ‘More Speech’ cannot alter the content of hate speech, but can only combat its causal harms.
"Moral Encroachment and Aesthetic Alienation"
Merely considering potential moral problems with an artwork can encroach on our aesthetic experience of the work in question. Even if we decide a work retains its aesthetic value and is worthy of full aesthetic engagement, we can find ourselves experiencing a phenomenon I call ‘Aesthetic Alienation.’ We become not just alienated from the work, but from our own judgment, unable to be swept up in the aesthetic experience we believe would be fitting. I give accounts of four ways art can be ‘Problematic,’ and yet worthy of aesthetic engagement. Some of these ways, such as those involving inequities in which stories are told, are incredibly widespread. I argue that we are morally obligated to consider the moral failings of art to adequately attend to injustice and create a better world. However, we ought to acknowledge that risking widespread Aesthetic Alienation is a significant sacrifice.