I completed my undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Toronto. My PhD in philosophy is from the CUNY Graduate Center. After completing my doctorate, I became assistant professor in the Bioethics Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Currently, I am professor of bioethics at the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College.
What I Think About
My research proposes a new way of thinking about the relationship between commonsense and scientific conceptual frameworks both in morality and in psychology. I challenge the dominant view of common sense as a static, either foundational or degenerative, basis of morality or psychology; instead, I characterize it as an ever-shifting repository of tenets from many domains. (I don’t say this to anonymous reviewers, but the upshot of my argument is that nothing is common sense.) For more on this, read my book Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense.
In my book, I began exploring cognitive influences on the sensory and discriminative aspects of pain. I continue this line of argument in two papers. In a paper published in The Monist, I argue that pain perception (yes, I think pain is a perceptual phenomenon, see here) is a cognitively penetrated phenomenon. In a paper published in AJOB Neuroscience, I draw out the consequences of the evidence for the cognitive penetration of pain perception on the nature of both placebo effects (pain relief that results from setting positive treatment expectations) and nocebo effects (the experience of pain that results from setting negative treatment expectations). Most recently, in a co-authored, forthcoming paper in the Kennedy Institute Ethics Journal, I discuss how, given the emotional and cognitive penetration of pain, disparities in the treatment of racialized patients can lead to significant differences in pain experience at the population level.
I have also been writing a lot about death. In particular, I have been interested in whether death is a scientific or a commonsense concept. I’ve argued that brain death is a biological (see here) and irreversible (see here) state. In a forthcoming paper in TheJournal of Medicine and Philosophy, I argue that even our commonsense concept of death is dependent on the biological characterization of death, i.e., death is not a commonsense concept.
BTW, I also write about the self a lot. I have been interested in the resiliency of the self through time despite even significant psychological changes. In a co-authored chapter, I show that what we used to think is important for the maintenance of self through time (e.g., keeping memories or personality traits) is actually not. I am currently working on a subjectivist account of personal continuity that does not demand you stay the same to keep being yourself. So, stay tuned.
