Melissa Rees, PhD

PhD Philosophy, University of Toronto (2022)

M.A. Philosophy, Columbia University (2015)

B.A. Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric - University of California at Berkeley (2013)

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• Applied Ethics, 
• Philosophy of Medicine, 
• Feminist Philosophy, 
• Philosophy of Disability 

• Digital Ethics, 
• Philosophy of Science, 
• Artificial Intelligence

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My interests in applied ethics focus upon autonomy, consent, and personhood. I pay special attention to the way environments support or undermine a subject's agential power. This often takes place when structures concretely limit or expand their choice space or when social narratives saturate sub-sets of choices with identity-supporting or identity-deteriorating qualities. 

In the philosophy of medicine I am interested in the way medical entities or categories which seem at first to belong exclusively to the realm of the special sciences (e.g. chemistry, biology, biochemistry, genomics, physiology) are partially socially constituted. My research thus far has focus on the category "placebo" where I argue that a purely causal theory of what distinguishes placebos from standard medical treatments is unsuccessful. There is an ineliminable social component having to do with intention and design. This account, presented in my dissertation "Placebos: Their Nature and Ethical Implications" reflects the best empirical understanding available at the time (2022). But of course inquiry into placebo effects in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, is ongoing!

I am currently writing a book on what I call Agential Corrosion, an increasingly widespread phenomenon wherein an individual's agency is undermined by their environment in distinctly harmful way: their "best case choice" is always (according to their own values and goals) is only ever the "worst bad option." I argue that this very often leads to a compounding feedback loop of alienation, further loss of agency, alienation, iterated until it culminates in a loss of one's very sense of self. The book project is diagnostic (identifying common causes across domains of human activity) and prognostic; I hope to provide actionable, scaleable, ways to disrupt such negative feedback loops.