Ethics

After studying professional ethics at Western Michigan University, a both the undergraduate and graduate level, I worked for a bit as a biomedical ethicist in a hospital setting. I coordinated the Biomedical Ethics Committee of the Butterworth and Blodgett campuses of Spectrum Health (now Corewell Health) for nearly four years, in the late 200s and early 2010s, as an adjunct to my job supervising the Revenue Cycle Informatics team. SHBEC was, at the time, a volunteer physician committee of the hospital's Medical Executive rather than a department in its own right, and so engagement there was an uncompensated bolt-on. During those four years, however, I was the primary responder to every "ethics emergency" in the health system, and also the convener and documenter of the full Biomedical Ethics Committee. The Committee included physicians, nurses, academic ethicists, pastors, a rabbi, and an attorney.

Since then, I've volunteered my expertise as an ethicist to various professional and trade groups. In 2018, for example, I was the co-lead and principal author of the team that rewrote from scratch the Code of Ethics for Healthcare Quality Professionals, as advanced by the National Association for Healthcare Quality. In 2021, I sat on working group of the Committee on Professional Ethics of the American Statistical Association, which coordinated the five-year revision of the Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice. From 2022 through 2024, I was a member of the advisory board for a National Science Foundation grant regarding the teaching of ethical competency to mathematicians led by Buell, Piercey, and Tractenberg.

I've been lately noodling through a monograph highlighting a cross-disciplinary approach to moral philosophy and moral pedagogy that I call Ludatory Ethics. Many of the insights of LE source from observations of how play influences early childhood development, and also how game theory serves as a meta-framework for understanding political economy. I'm tentatively aiming to release the monograph sometime in 2026.