S. Matthew Liao is an American philosopher specializing in bioethics. He currently holds the Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy. He has previously held appointments at Oxford University, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton University.
Biography
Liao received his undergraduate degreemagna cum laude in philosophy from Princeton University in 1994 and then earned his D.Phil. in philosophy at Oxford University in 2001. His doctoral dissertation concerned whether children have a right to be loved. Liao later wrote a book in this topic called The Rightto be Loved, a Choice Review Outstanding Academic Title, published by Oxford University Press. From 2003 to 2004, Liao was the Harold T. Shapiro Research Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. From 2004 to 2006 he served as the Greenwall Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and as a visiting researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. From 2006 to 2009 he was the deputy director and James Martin Senior Research Fellow in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences at Oxford University. Since 2009 he has held an appointment in the Bioethics Department at New York University. In 2013 he gave a TED talk in New York City on engineering humans to combat climate change. His work has been discussed in The Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times, and Scientific American. In May 2007, he founded Ethics Etc., a group blog for discussing contemporary philosophical issues in ethics and related areas.
Work
In addition to The Right to be Loved, Liao was the editor of three other books: Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality ; Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights ; and Current Controversies in Bioethics. The Right to be Loved explores whether children hold rights, the extent to which love is an appropriate object of right, and what grounds a child's right to be loved. It argues that children do hold this right, in virtue of human beings having a general right to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. In other works, Liao considers the ethics of reproductive technologies, neuroethics, cognitive enhancement, consequentialism, and artificial intelligence. For example, he has written on Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Loop Case and challenged standard intuitions about the thought experiment. He has written about memory modification technologies, arguing that their permissibility depends upon individual users' decisions. In another article, Liao argues against seeing intuitions as heuristics, and explores the implications of this point for the debate concerning the reliability of intuitions.
