What is "essential" may in fact be the question at the center of morality (or rather, its higher level study -- Value Theory). The question of 'what is essential to human beings?' often guides moral thinking, especially in utilitarian schemes. What is "essential" is often considered a baseline for moral reasoning -- after all, to ..read more

MAiD, or medical assistance in dying is the process wherein a physician or nurse practitioner provides to the patient either directly or so that the patient can self-administer, a substance that causes their death. I've already provided a primer on MAiD here, so I won't be going into the bare-bones details again. Although, it should ..read more

On July 26th 2022, I successfully defended my Ph.D Thesis, "The Techno-Inclusive Model of Disability: Motivations, Influences, and Applications" and became Dr. Sargent. Among other things, my dissertation advances the position that disability can be usefully understood through technology and that an understanding of disability that takes into account the breadth and importance of technology ..read more

My first published academic article came out today! Check out the peer-reviewed AI Bias in Healthcare: Using ImpactPro as a Case Study for Healthcare Practitioners’ Duties to Engage in Anti-Bias Measures at the link below. https://cjb-rcb.ca/index.php/cjb-rcb/article/view/288?fbclid=IwAR0GhzfSssZLxoDwVHmKd91uX888BM4Ujbm1yW3hF5nDak0pbIWn46sIWQk If you're interested in some of my earlier thoughts on this, I also wrote a more blog post style ..read more

What is Enhancement? It's a tricky question, and probably not one you have thought about before, but it becomes very relevant when we talk about all sorts of emerging technologies from genetic therapies to advanced prosthetics. An easy, seemingly obvious answer is that enhancement is something that gives someone capabilities beyond the norm either in ..read more

What is it like to be an ethicist? What skills, methods, and experiences do ethicists bring to the table when it comes to problem solving? I thought it might be nice to provide a case example (Sexthical theories part 2!!), especially because I think this problem I stumbled upon is particularly interesting, difficult, and not ..read more

These last few months, I have been working on my Applied Research Project as part of my Ph.D program at the University of Waterloo. This project was originally supposed to take place within a group of Long Term Care Homes (LTCHs) in the KW region, however, due to COVID-19, that was unable to happen. Nonetheless ..read more

COVID-19 has obviously stirred up a lot of ethical challenges. It has exacerbated issues of inequality, forced hospitals and healthcare practicioners to make difficult decisions and implement very imperfect policies when it comes to the rationing of scarce medical resources, and has created dozens of new public health questions in regards to how best to ..read more

Dear friends. As you might imagine, today's post is about COVID-19, but I want to assure you that it is also very much not a post about COVID-19. Today's post is about how I think it is largely a mistake to think about ethics as a series of individual actions. The further I go into ..read more

Philosophy at its base cannot emerge from nothing, nor can ethics. Every ethical system is based on some particular understanding of what is most important about the world, and in particular, about humans. They all implicitly have some underlying value that guides the theory as it is built up. For example, Utilitarianism takes its basic important ..read more