My most recent publication is "The Other Side of Trust in Health Care: Prescribing Drugs with the Potential for Abuse", Bioethics, January 2007, Vol 21, Issue 1, pp. 51-60.

I am currently working on several projects. 

"Trust, Method, and Moral Progress in Feminist Bioethics" in Feminist Bioethics: At the Centre, At the Margins, J. L. Scully, L. Baldwin-Ragaven, and P. Fitzpatrick, eds. Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming).

I am also working on a paper on the ability of heroin addicts to consent to therapeutic research which involves the free provision of their substance of abuse, a topic on which I presented at the 2005 American Society for Bioethics and Humanities annual meeting in October 2005.

My newest project involves a consideration of the impact of recent fMRI studies on how we understand the process of moral judgment and the role of emotion in moral judgment, specifically the potential impact of this research on hospital based ethics consulting. I presented this at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities annual meeting in Washington in October 2007. Here is the abstract:

The ASBH 9th Annual Meeting (October 18-21, 2007) of ASBH

Friday, 19 October 2007 - 10:30 AM

"Can Neuroimaging of Moral Judgment Improve Ethics Consultation?"

In a now famous experiment that appeared in Science in 2001, Joshua Greene and coauthors administered MRI scans to subjects as they weighed moral dilemmas. When they found subjects less likely to allow a present known individual to perish than a distant stranger, they concluded that emotional response is a significant component of moral judgment. Since then, several additional empirical studies have suggested a strong link between a subject's emotional state, including automatic affective reactions such as the application of morally laden stereotypes, and the type of moral judgments he or she is apt to make. Green's most recent work suggests that much of the important labor of moral decision making is done by neural networks on a subconscious level, prior to the kind of conscious reflection which clinical ethicists encourage. Others, such as Green's collaborator Jonathan Haidt, have gone as far as to suggest that moral reasoning, far from causing moral judgment, is actually a post hoc construction.

Of course, empirical moral psychology is in its infancy, and restraint should be exercised in drawing conclusions from this data, since moral cognition is a highly complex whole brain activity involving multiple sub-processes. And descriptions about what moral actors do can hardly serve as prescriptions for what they ought to do. There is also disagreement about whether these studies support one theory (virtue ethics?) over another (utilitarianism?), or whether, indeed, they undermine the notion of free will necessary for moral decision making to get its bearings at all. At a minimum, however, the research indicates that the common sense picture of moral decision-making relied on by most bioethicists is in important ways incomplete or even inaccurate.

Bioethicists strive to provide workable models of moral decision making which can aid clinicians in the care of patients. Foremost among these are principlism, virtue ethics, and casuistry. Even clinical bioethicists who eschew self-contained models of moral judgment in favor of deliberative processes tend to focus, not surprisingly, on conscious deliberation. I contend that experimental neurological findings can and should impact traditional clinical ethics practice, especially in hospital settings. While clinical bioethics has in general done a commendable job of eschewing ideal moral theory, it remains an important and unfulfilled task to find ways to address intuitions that may determine, often in defeating ways, the goals of ethics consultations. In particular, awareness of the importance of contexts, of the social nature of moral reasoning, and of the bundled nature of elements of moral judgment (emotion, affect, reasoning, desire) that are separable in analysis but not in practice, can ensure that bioethicists' methods and aims are congruent with actual human cognitive capacities."

You can read about my past research on the ethics of trust here.