 | I am a resident physician in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. I received my medical degree from UC San Francisco and my doctorate in philosophy from New York University; I have also completed an internship in internal medicine in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. My academic interests lie at the intersection between philosophy and medicine (especially neurology). |
selected papers | "Justifying Patient Risks Associated with Medical Education" JAMA, September 5 2007 |
 | "The Real Problem with Equipoise" and "Response to Commentators on 'The Real Problem with Equipoise'" American Journal of Bioethics, July-August 2006 The equipoise requirement in clinical research demands that, if patients are to be randomly assigned to one of two interventions in a clinical trial, there must be genuine doubt about which is better. This reflects the traditional view that doctors must never knowingly compromise the care of their patients, even for the sake of future patients. Equipoise has proven to be deeply problematic, especially in the Third World. Some recent critics have argued against equipoise on the grounds that clinical research is fundamentally distinct from clinical care, and thus should be governed by different norms. I argue against this "difference position," and instead take issue with the traditional, exclusively patient-centered account of doctors' obligations that equipoise presupposes. In place of this traditional view, I propose a Kantian test for the reasonable partiality that doctors should show their patients, focusing on its application in clinical research and medical education. . |
 | "Brain Death without Definitions" Hastings Center Report, November-December 2005 In recent years, many bioethicists and philosophers have come to regard the whole-brain criterion of death as incoherent. I argue that the criterion itself is sound, but that the philosophical model to which both the advocates and critics of brain death have appealed is deeply misguided. This widely-accepted definitions-criteria-tests model assumes that there must be some special intrinsic characteristic common to all living or all dead things, and that conceptual investigation of our ordinary conception of death can reveal what this characteristic is. These assumptions have been seriously undermined by the influential arguments of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. Drawing upon their insights, and also upon promising recent work in the philosophy of biology, I propose a new model for our understanding of life and death, which provides a more solid justification for the whole-brain criterion. [letters and reply] |
| "Diagnosing and Defining Disease" In Health, Disease and Illness: Concepts in Medicine, Caplan, McCartney & Sisti, eds. Georgetown University Press, 2004. | |
| "Ethical Issues, Overview", with Wade S. Smith In Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences, Aminoff & Daroff, eds. Academic Press, 2003. | |
| "Industry-to-Physician Marketing and the Cost of Prescription Drugs" American Journal of Bioethics, Summer 2003. An online commentary on Katz, Caplan & Merz, "All Gifts Large and Small: Toward an Understanding of the Ethics of Pharmaceutical Industry Gift Giving." | |
| dissertation | A Principled Partiality: A Kantian Account of Special Obligation Committee: Thomas Nagel (advisor), Liam Murphy and Derek Parfit On a commonsense view special obligations, such as those arising in family and professional relationships, direct us to give greater weight to the interests of those related to us in certain ways than to the interests of strangers. But how can this priority be justified, and how far should it extend? In my dissertation I propose a Kantian universalizability test, here applied to motives rather than to maxims or policies--what I call "motive Kantianism," a sort of Kantian virtue theory. I argue that motive Kantianism generates plausible verdicts regarding the partiality and demandingness of special obligations, exploring the application of this principle in family relationships, doctor-patient relationships, and promissory relationships. In the conclusion and appendix I go on to consider how this view might justify two other commonsense departures from impartial consideration (deontological constraints and agent-centered permissions), and present a motive Kantian conception of individual autonomy. |