I work primarily at the intersection of applied ethics (AI ethics, bioethics) and feminist philosophy. I’m especially interested in issues involving harm, a concept which has received surprisingly little attention in both applied and feminist ethics despite appearing frequently in these literatures.

In addressing this gap, I engage with under-explored topics including the ‘philosophy of harm reduction’ and make new connections across feminist philosophy, public health and health care ethics, philosophy of harm, AI ethics, and the philosophy of trust.

Other research of mine engages with the ethics of AI more broadly, including work on trust and AI, and AI use in education.


Publications

Articles

  1. 2026. Baleshta, Clair. “Harm and Social Location,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-026-10537-z

  2. 2024. DiBerardino, Nathalie, Clair Baleshta, and Luke Stark. “Algorithmic Harms and Algorithmic Wrongs,” Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), 1725–32. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3659001

Shorter Publications and Reviews

  1. Forthcoming. Baleshta, Clair. Review of Mark Kingwell, “Questioning Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations” (2024), University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ)

  2. 2023. Baleshta, Clair. “Toward a Feminist View of Harm,” Blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA),  July 2023 https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/06/28/toward-a-feminist-view-of-harm/

  3. 2020. Baleshta, Clair. “Trust and Medical Knowledge,” Hospital News, 22 July 2020

Under Review

  1. Baleshta, Clair. [Title redacted for review.]

    A paper focused on developing guidelines for expanding harm reduction frameworks to new contexts.

  2. Baleshta, Clair and Carolyn McLeod [Title redacted for review.]

    A paper focus on trust and artificial intelligence.

Works In Progress

  1. Baleshta, Clair. “A Harm Reduction Approach to AI?” (Complete Draft Available)

  2. Baleshta, Clair. “Trust and Harm Reduction, Trust as Harm Reduction” (Draft in Progress)

  3. Baleshta, Clair. “Understanding AI Harm” (Draft in Progress)