Danielle Wenner

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Bio

I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm also the Associate Director of CMU's Center for Ethics & Policy and an Affiliate Faculty Member at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Bioethics and Health Law.

Education

I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from Rice University in 2011, after which I completed a clinical ethics fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic in 2013. From 2013 to 2015 I was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of the Humanities at CMU.

Research

Broadly speaking, my research addresses lacuna in three different areas of applied ethics and applied political philosophy. The first is research ethics, broadly construed; what ethical and methodological standards ought to govern the behavior of researchers and research sponsors who conduct research involving human subjects, and how ought research participants and the communities they are drawn from to be treated before, during, and after the conduct of research? The second is global justice, with a more specific focus on exploitation: what kinds of responsibilities do privileged individuals, states, or organizations have to low- and middle-income individuals or populations when they interact with them in various ways, and in particular how should obligations grounded in a principled objection to exploitation be balanced against welfare considerations that often make exploitation appear better than non-interaction for all parties? Finally, democracy and group decision-making: how ought groups structure decision-making so as to best make use of the epistemic diversity of their comprising members, and how ought epistemic obligations be distributed among them? Although these are three distinct areas of research, in practice there is significant overlap between them. For example, many of the questions in research ethics that I seek to address are also questions of justice and exploitation. Similarly, analyses of group decision-making can be usefully applied to problems in clinical research oversight. For more about my research, visit my homepage.