Nat Martin

Philosopher

Hi, I'm Nat. I'm a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto in the Department of Philosophy. I specialize in philosophy of medicine, moral philosophy, and feminist philosophy.Please feel free to reach out to me with inquiries at nat.martin@utoronto.ca

Research

My primary research is in applied ethics, philosophy of medicine, feminist philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of disability. I have other interests in philosophy of mind, philosophy of education, and political philosophy.

My dissertation argues that healthcare practitioners have a duty to provide prognostic information to patients diagnosed with disabilities and chronic illnesses. While the duty to prognosticate is well-established in end-of-life and critical care contexts, it has been systematically neglected for disability and chronic illness diagnoses. This gap, I argue, is unjustified: patients diagnosed with disabilities and chronic illnesses face profound needs for prognostic information that practitioners are uniquely positioned to meet. Drawing on bioethics and feminist theory, I ground the duty to prognosticate in both autonomy and beneficence. This framework explains that practitioners must do more than transfer information: they must build trust, support patients' confidence in their own judgment (self-trust), and cultivate realistic hope. Fulfilling this duty, I argue, requires distributed responsibility across healthcare systems. This includes changes for medical education in prognostic reasoning, institutional support for prognostic conversations, and collaboration across disciplines. Practitioners already make prognostic judgments constantly, often implicitly. My work demonstrates how they can do so thoughtfully and transparently, with attention to the particular challenges and needs of patients navigating disability and chronic illness. Integrating philosophical analysis with clinical realities and disabled people's lived experiences, my work aims to reshape how practitioners and systems understand and fulfill prognostic responsibilities.