Professore Ordinario in political and social theory, and political bioethics, informed by philosophy, political science and sociology, at the University of Texas at Austin. Visiting professorships in Germany (Frankfurt/O.), Japan (Tokyo Gaidai, Hokkaido), China (Beiwai), Austria (Linz, Innsbruck) and Brazil (Goiãnia). Studied with Michael Walzer in Princeton, Axel Honneth in Berlin, and Seyla Benhabib at Yale. Author of << Thick Moralities, Thin Politics [Duke Univ Press]>> (public policy suffers when politics are laden with moral doctrines, and should work not toward consensus but toward the more realistic goal of mutual accommodation); << C…
Professore Ordinario in political and social theory, and political bioethics, informed by philosophy, political science and sociology, at the University of Texas at Austin. Visiting professorships in Germany (Frankfurt/O.), Japan (Tokyo Gaidai, Hokkaido), China (Beiwai), Austria (Linz, Innsbruck) and Brazil (Goiãnia). Studied with Michael Walzer in Princeton, Axel Honneth in Berlin, and Seyla Benhabib at Yale. Author of << Thick Moralities, Thin Politics [Duke Univ Press]>> (public policy suffers when politics are laden with moral doctrines, and should work not toward consensus but toward the more realistic goal of mutual accommodation); << Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms [SUNY Press] >> (while moral validity is relative rather than absolute, and cultural meanings local rather than universal, social integration and democratic politics are still attainable goals); << Human Rights as Social Construction [Cambridge Univ Press] >> (human rights can be authored by the ordinary people to whom they are addressed, and they are valid only if embraced by those to whom they would apply); and << The Human Rights State [Univ of Pennsylvania Press] >> (a social movement conceived as a metaphorical alternative to the nation state, as a polity without territory, standing alongside the nation state, as a political and moral commitment that, in the pursuit of human rights, would limit national sovereignty without undermining it). Currently writing a book (under contract at Cambridge University Press) that develops a new approach -- “political bioethics” -- titled << Creating Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering >>. Has presented aspects of this project at invited lectures in the USA, Europe, Asia, and South America. 2016: Fulbright Professor, University of Linz, Austria. 2018: visiting professor at Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics as well as the Ethox Centre (Nuffield Dept of Population Health), both University of Oxford. 2019: visiting researcher at le Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire (Université de Paris) and at the Danish Institute for Human Rights (Copenhagen). 2021-22: Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Public International Law at Lund University in Sweden (Law School & Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law). 2022: visiting scholar at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9510-6147