research

I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, working primarily in bioethics and philosophy of medicine. I am also interested in questions in epistemology, philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of education.

My dissertation argues for a practitioner's responsibility to prognosticate in the context of routine care. This is distinct from the dominant literature, which only focuses on the duty to prognosticate when caring for patients who are critically ill or considering some intervention. I argue that the practitioner's duty to prognosticate is grounded in the needs patients have for this information and the unique epistemic access that practitioners have to it. The importance of fulfilling the duty to prognosticate is demonstrated by cases where patients are facing a diagnosis with the potential to change the trajectory of their life — such as a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. But the duty is not limited to such high-stakes cases: it arises just as much in lower-stakes, everyday clinical encounters, wherever patients depend on practitioners to help them anticipate what's ahead.

I use cases such as these to spell out the conditions that give rise to the duty to prognosticate, the scope of the duty, and the complications practitioners face in fulfilling it.