Project Description
Home / Members / Graduate Students / Clair Baleshta
RESEARCH AREAS:
Feminist Philosophy
Applied Ethics (AI Ethics, Bioethics)
Ethics
CONTACT:
CLAIR BALESHTA
Doctoral Student,
Department of Philosophy, Western University
Clair is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Western University. She completed her undergraduate degree in Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo, minoring in Philosophy and Mathematics, and received her MA in Philosophy from the University of Guelph.
Her research interests span applied ethics (especially AI ethics and bioethics), feminist philosophy, and normative ethics. She is particularly interested in issues surrounding harm and harm reduction.
My research focuses on topics at the intersection of applied ethics (AI ethics, bioethics), feminist philosophy, and normative ethics. 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.
“A Relational View of AI Harm,” Sustainable AI Conference, Bonn University, Germany, September 2025
“Trust and Artificial Intelligence” (with Carolyn McLeod), Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), George Brown College, Canada, May 2025
“Trust and AI” (with Carolyn McLeod), Human-AI Relationships Research Retreat, Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University, Canada, May 2025
“Harm Reduction and Actionable Harm: A Guideline for Expansion” North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP), American Philosophical Association (APA) Pacific Division Affiliate Group Session, San Franscisco, USA, April 2025
“Harm and Social Location” American Philosophical Association (APA) Pacific Division (Symposium), San Francisco, USA, April 2025
“Understanding AI Harm,” Sustainable AI Lab, Institute for Science and Ethics, Bonn University, Germany, April 2025
“Earning Trust: Lessons from Harm Reduction,” Practices of Trust Symposium, Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin, April 2025
“Harm Reduction in Novel Contexts: A Feminist Relational Account,” Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), McGill University, Canada, June 2024
“Algorithmic Harms and Algorithmic Wrongs” (with Nathalie DiBerardino and Luke Stark), ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 2024
“Algorithmic Harms and Algorithmic Wrongs” (with Nathalie DiBerardino and Luke Stark), (Dis)Trust and AI: Perspectives Across Disciplines and Sectors, Western University, Canada, October 2023
“Harm and Artificial Intelligence,” From Inequality to Justice: Law and Ethics of AI and Technology, Law and Technology Institute, Dalhousie University, Canada, June 2023
“Toward a Feminist View of Harm” Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), York University, Canada, May 2023
“A Harm Reduction Approach to Medical AI” Canadian Society for the Study of Practical Ethics (CSSPE), York University, Canada, May 2023
“A Feminist View of Medical AI Harm” International Conference on Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE 2023), Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, May 2023
“A Feminist Perspective on the Benefits of Collective Action,” Social Ontology & Collective Intentionality, University of Vienna, Austria, August 2022
“Health Care Barriers Imposed by a Lack of Social Supports: Social Isolation and Relational Autonomy,” Southwestern Ontario Feminism and Philosophy Workshop, University of Waterloo, Canada, December 2021
“Distrust in Human Interactions with AI,” IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, CARE-AI Special Session, Universities of Guelph and Waterloo, Canada, October 2021
“Trust, Distrust, and Human Interactions with AI,” SAS 21: Trust in Science, HLRS Stuttgart, Germany, October 2021
“Reasonability Facades” MANCEPT Workshop: Prudence and Politics, University of Manchester, UK, September 2021
“Reasonability Facades: A Flaw in the Deliberative Model of Democracy,” Knowledge and Power: Epistemic Conflicts in Democracy, University of Essex, UK, July 2021
“A Modified Account of Explanatory Fictions in Science,” Rotman Graduate Student Conference: Complexity and Explanation, Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University, Canada, May 2021
Co-Instructor
Normative Ethics (Philosophy, Third-Year), Western University
Tutorial Instructor
Ethics, Law and Politics (Philosophy, First-Year), Western University
Ethics, Law and Politics (Philosophy, First-Year), Western University
Introduction to Philosophy (Philosophy, First-Year), Western University
Introduction to Philosophy (Philosophy, First-Year), Western University
Social and Political Issues (Philosophy, First-Year), University of Guelph
Ethics (Philosophy, Second-Year), University of Guelph
Teaching Assistant
Power, Oppression, and Privilege (Philosophy, Second-Year), Western University
The Social Nature of Knowledge (Cross-listed Knowledge Integration & Philosophy, Second-Year), University of Waterloo
The Social Nature of Knowledge (Cross-listed Knowledge Integration & Philosophy, Second-Year), University of Waterloo
Guest Lecturer
“Our Treatment of Non-Human Animals,” Ethics, Law, and Politics (Philosophy, First-Year), Western University, March 19 and 21, 2024
“Harm and Artificial Intelligence,” Ethical and Societal Implications of A.I. (Cross-listed Philosophy & CompSci, Graduate-Level Course), Western University, February 16, 2023
“Responsibility for Justice,” Power, Oppression, and Privilege (Philosophy, Second-Year), Western University, Week of November 28, 2022
Articles
Baleshta, Clair. 2026. “Harm and Social Location,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-026-10537-z
DiBerardino, Nathalie, Clair Baleshta, and Luke Stark. 2024. “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
Baleshta, Clair. Forthcoming. Review of Mark Kingwell, Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations (2024), University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ)
Baleshta, Clair. 2023. “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/
Baleshta, Clair, Dylan White, Glen Reavie, Alysha Cooper, Graham Taylor, Joshua August Gus Skorburg, David Van Bruwaene, et al. 2021. “CARE-AI Special Session on AI Ethics.” In 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS)
Baleshta, Clair. 2020. “Trust and Medical Knowledge.” Hospital News, 22 July 2020. hospitalnews.com/trust-and-medical-knowledge/