While my research is primarily in the ethics of parenthood and procreation, I work in a wide range of academic issues including: the ethics of killing, bioethics, the value of aging and death, political theology, religious liberty and the scope of conscience rights, incarceration and post-incarceration stigmas, the history and nature of evangelicalism, and Shakespeare.
Published Papers
Is Religious Liberty Under Threat?: An Introduction to the Symposium, Studies in Christian Ethics, May 2020
This introduction surveys the contributions to this issue, which were originally delivered at Oxford University in 2018. By exploring the interconnections and shared motifs, this article suggests that the answer to this symposium is a tentative ‘yes’, but that the sources of those threats arise from the background culture within which these papers are situated.
What the State Owes Bastards: A Modest Critique of Modest One-Child Policies, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Available online November 2019
This essay criticises ‘modest’ one-child policies, which would impose sanctions upon parents who create multiple children. Specifically, this article considers what the state owes individuals who would be born (illegally) beneath restrictive procreative policies and argues that such policies would fail to show due respect to second- or third-born individuals created beneath them. First, I argue that modest procreative restrictions (like sanctions) are likely to generate only modest compliance. I then suggest it is reasonable to think a one-child policy fails to demonstrate due respect to existing second and third children. I argue that such a policy generates an undue burden on any second or third children who would be born beneath them, before concluding by considering whether the state might be able to avoid effec-tively reinscribing ‘bastardy’ into its law by locating responsibility for the effects of such a policy entirely on the parents, rather than on children.
Forthcoming Papers
“Indexing Burdens and Benefits of Treatment to Age: Revisiting Paul Ramsey’s ‘Medical Indications Policy,’” under review.
“Parenthood, Patient as Person, and Research with Children,” in Paul Ramsey: The Man, His Thought, and a Groundbreaking Approach to Bioethics, forthcoming.
Book Reviews
Humility, pride, and Christian virtue theory by Kent Dunnington, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019 & Humility and human flourishing: a study in analytic moral theology by Michael W. Austin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018.
In Political Theology, January/February 2020
Susannah Cornwall, Un/Familiar Theology: Reconceiving Sex, Reproduction and Generativity, (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
In Studies in Christian Ethics, 2018.