S. Matthew Liao

S. Matthew Liao
Born	1972 (age 51–52) Taichung, Taiwan
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University (A. B.) Oxford University (D. Phil)
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Bioethics; Ethics; Moral Psychology; Metaphysics; Epistemology

S. Matthew Liao (born 1972) 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, Georgetown, and Princeton University.

Biography

Liao received his undergraduate degree magna 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 and what it might consist of.

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. While there, he founded Ethics Etc., a group blog for discussing contemporary philosophical issues in ethics and related areas, which has received over 10 million hits since 2007. 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 arguing that we should combat climate change by biologically modifying humans instead of doing so through unpredictable geoengineering projects. He gave another TED Talk in 2015 at CERN, where he discussed the ethical dilemmas involved in using memory modification technologies to remove traumatic memories and treat PTSD.

His work has been discussed in The Guardian, the BBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Scientific American. In 2019, he was appointed as an Elected Fellow at The Hastings Center, a prestigious bioethics research institute.

Work

Liao has written on a variety of subjects, including human rights and the rights of children; the ethics of emerging technologies; non-consequentialism; and intuitions and intentionality.

In 2015, Liao wrote a book called The Right to be Loved, which received Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title award. The Right to be Loved explores whether children are rightholders, the extent to which love is an appropriate object of rights, and what grounds a child's right to be loved. It argues that, in virtue of human beings having a general right to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life, they do hold this right. Some of Liao's recent work, including articles on the right to public health care and the moral status of artificial intelligence, have drawn from and expanded on this fundamental conditions account to human rights.

In addition to The Right to be Loved, Liao edited four other books: Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (2015), Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (2016), Current Controversies in Bioethics (2017), and The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2020). He is currently writing another book analyzing the ethical questions raised by near-term neurotechnologies.

He has also published extensively about the use of emerging technologies for both treatment and enhancement. For instance, Liao argued that memory modification technologies can exacerbate existing inequalities and harm our sense of self but may still be permissible in certain instances. He has also written on how medications such as propranolol and oxytocin can enhance feelings of parental love, noting that people unable to love their children might be obligated to take them. Recently, Liao forwarded a rights-based case for reproductive genetic engineering grounded in his fundamental conditions approach.

In addition, Liao has written several papers on intuition; for instance, he argued that experimental philosophy studies do not disprove the reliability of folk intuitions but can be combined with traditional philosophical analysis. He has also written on Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Loop Case, challenging standard intuitions about the thought experiment by demonstrating that they are context-dependent. More recently, Liao argued that intuitions should not be understood as heuristics and explores the implications of this approach for philosophical and neuroscientific debates about their robustness.

Bibliography

Books

• The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (ed.), Oxford University Press 2020.
• Current Controversies in Bioethics (ed.), Routledge 2016.
• Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (ed.), Oxford University Press 2016.
• Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (ed.), Oxford University Press 2015.
• The Right to Be Loved, Oxford University Press 2015.

Selected Articles

• Liao, S. Matthew (2005). "The Ethics of Using Genetic Engineering for Sex Selection". Journal of Medical Ethics. 31 (2).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2005). "Rescuing Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research: The Blastocyst Transfer Method". The American Journal of Bioethics. 5 (6).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2006). "The Right of Children to Be Loved". Journal of Political Philosophy. 14 (4).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2008). "A Defense of Intuitions". Philosophical Studies. 140 (2).
• Liao, S. Matthew; Sandberg, Anders (2008). "The Normativity of Memory Modification". Neuroethics. 1.
• Liao, S. Matthew (2010). "The Basis of Human Moral Status". Journal of Moral Philosophy. 7 (2).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2011). "Parental Love Pills: Some Ethical Considerations". Bioethics. 25 (9).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2012). "Putting the Trolley in Order: Experimental Philosophy and the Loop Case". Philosophical Psychology. 25 (5).
• Liao, S. Matthew; Etinson, Adam (2012). "Political and Naturalistic Conceptions of Human Rights: A False Polemic?". Journal of Moral Philosophy. 9 (3). {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
• Liao, S. Matthew; Sandberg, Anders; Roache, Rebecca (2012). "Human Engineering and Climate Change". Ethics, Policy, and the Environment. 15 (2).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2016). "Health (care) and Human Rights: A Fundamental Conditions Approach". Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. 37 (4).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2017). "Do Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques Affect Qualitative or Numerical Identity". Bioethics. 31 (1).
• Liao, S. Matthew (2019). "Designing Humans: A Human Rights Approach". Bioethics. 33 (1).