CHARLOTTE DUFFEE

I am a Research Associate with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, where I was formerly a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Fellow. I'm also a Research Fellow at the Elm Institute. My work explores the social and cultural factors at play when moral problems become objects of medical theory, assessment, and treatment. I focus specifically on the medical construction of tragedy as a window into broader cultural sensibilities about human values: what it means to be human, what our purpose is, what makes for a good life (especially when times are bad), and the like. I explore why the historical actors who medicalized tragedy asked the questions that they did, and why they accepted some answers over others. I then work to fill the philosophical gaps my historical explanations expose in contemporary ethical and empirical scholarship. So far, I have focused on the following themes:

Histories of Suffering in Western Medicine and Thought

The historiography of suffering

- The state of the art of suffering in the history of medicine
- Methodologies for historicizing suffering, including digital humanities

Intellectual and cultural histories of tragedy in medicine

- Narratives of suffering in 20th-century American medicine and bioethics
- The intellectual history of moral injury

Broader histories of the tragic in Western thought

- Concepts, moral valuations, and political prescriptions for suffering in the Western canon
- Ennobling responses to adversity in Western moral philosophy

Medical Philosophies of Tragedy and Their Applications

Philosophical implications of historical research on suffering

Recovering historical anomalies excluded by existing medical theories and empirical measures of suffering
The intersection between history and metaethics

The normativity of suffering

Distinctions between pain and suffering
Discrepancies between pain science and bioethical/medical theories of suffering, and the satisfactoriness of these theories
Moral valuations of suffering
Exemplarist virtue ethics
Definitions of moral injury, distress, and moral distress

Suffering in applied ethics