Rethinking Catholic Attitudes on Puberty Blockers

An increasing number of communities have found themselves dependent on Catholic providers of acute care. As such, if the Church accepts advice against a certain form of treatment, a de facto ban on that treatment is then in place. This has proven to be the case for puberty blockers as a treatment for gender non-conforming youth. I argue that the typical prohibition on this treatment—that puberty blockers are tantamount to gender transition, which is prohibited—fails because puberty blockers are neither necessary nor sufficient for transition. Moreover, if puberty blockers are not prohibited in Catholic care, it is plausible to think there are cases in which Catholic ethics have good reason to appraise the use of puberty blockers for gender non-conforming youths as obligatory. Read more.

Lies of Omission and Compassionate Patient Care

The central tenant of ethics in healthcare, in the Western tradition, comes from the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”. That has largely been understood to mean healthcare providers should provide a complete and honest accounting of all pertinent information for their patients. Honesty, it is rather uncontroversial to say, is a virtue amongst the myriad experts we interact with in our daily comings and goings. Complete honesty, however, may not be what Hippocrates had in mind. Despite recent changes in law and longer traditions in bioethics literature it would serve us well to reconsider what role ignorance can play in abiding by the best interest of patients. That is of course not to say the literature is completely devoid of such heterodox position but there lacks a robust moral framework detailing the problem that for physicians to “do no harm”, patients ought to be kept ignorant at times. What follows is an outline for such a framework. Read more.

Sadism in the Bedroom: Metaethical Reasons to Prefer Kantianism to Utilitarianism

Available in the 2022 issue of Sapere Aude

In this paper I propose pragmatic metaethical argument to favor neo-Kantian moral reasoning over Utilitarianism. The argument is predicated on a development of “personal duty” in accordance with Kant’s condition of universalizability as it applies to the ethics of sex and a case study pertaining to sadism and consent. Read more.

MRI Phantom for Strain Verification

My engineering senior capstone dealt with the development of a device that can be used to evaluate the strain detection capabilities of DENSE-sequence MR imaging. The aim was to produce a proprietary imaging phantom capable of assessing the diagnostic capabilities of DENSE for brain maladies such as Chiari malformation. While the capstone project has been completed the research we were able to conduct with it is ongoing and preliminary results have been published. More on this project here.

This research also led to the development of a new material useful for constructing MRI phantoms. The abstract for that study was published in the conference proceedings for SB3C 2022. Those proceedings can be found here.