Guest Blogging – Jessica Flanigan

By On February 28, 2012 · 2 Comments · In Blog Administration

I’m pleased to announce that Jessica Flanigan is going to be guest blogging for BHL for the coming month.

Jessica works on political philosophy and applied ethics. This year she is a ABD at Princeton’s Program in Political Philosophy and a visiting scholar at Brown University. Next semester, she will join the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at University of Richmond. Her dissertation, Liberal Medicine, explores the ethics of pharmaceutical regulation. There she argues that prohibitive pre-market testing requirements and prescription drug systems are seriously unjust because they violate citizens’ rights of self-medication and are discriminatory. More generally, she is interested in bioethics, leadership ethics, feminism, liberalism, business ethics, normative ethics, political economy, and philosophy of law. You can find more information about her work on her website.

 
  • http://www.realadultsex.com figleaf

    Citizens rights and self medication sounds like a rich environment for PhD work. As it happens I’m visiting my mother’s retirement center trying to straighten out her medical care.

    A retirement home is an interesting context. Between living wills, medical powers of attorney, medication-induced memory loss, and so on it’s interesting trying to figure out where agency lies.

    This is, of course, an edge case. My mom was a medical professional so she’s ordinarily well informed and well prepared to make non-random decisions. But then again she’s also old enough to remember when physicians made… experimental recommendations. Which means she would generally be able to ask probing questions about her care. (Now? Not so much.)

    Anyway, I look forward to Jessica Flanigan’s thoughts on the issues.

    figleaf

    • Jessica Flanigan

      Thanks for your interest! I hope all goes well with your mother’s care. Paternalism towards the elderly is a serious injustice that deserves much more attention, and I hope that she is treated with kindness AND respect.