S Matthew Liao

Director of the Center for Bioethics

Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics

Professional overview

Dr. Matthew Liao uses the tools of philosophy to study and examine the ramifications of novel biomedical innovations.

A speaker at TEDxCERN, Dr. Liao discussed whether it is ethical for someone to erase certain aspects of their memories and how doing so might affect that individual's identity. He has also given a TED talk in New York and been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and other numerous media outlets.

The author and editor of four books, Dr. Liao provides the academic community with a collection of human rights essays. In The Right to be Loved, he explores the philosophical foundations underpinning children's right to be loved, and proposes that we reconceptualize our policies concerning adoptions so that individuals who are not romantically linked can co-adopt a child together.

Dr. Liao provides students with an education grounded in a broad conception of bioethics encompassing both medical and environmental ethics. He offers students the opportunity to explore the intersection of human rights practice with central domains of public health and regularly teaches normative theory and neuroethics. His courses address how the rightness or wrongness of an act is determined and ethical issues arising out of new medical technologies such as embryonic stem cell research, cloning, artificial reproduction, and genetic engineering; ethical issues raised by the development and use of neuroscientific technologies such as the ethics of erasing traumatic memories; the ethics of mood and cognitive enhancements; and moral and legal implications of "mind-reading" technologies for brain privacy.

To learn more about Dr. Liao and his work, visit his website and blog.

Education

AB, Politics (Magna Cum Laude), Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

DPhil, Philosophy, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Honors and awards

Outstanding Academic Title, The Right to Be Loved, Choice Review (2016)

TEDx Speaker at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland (2015)

TEDx Speaker, New York, NY (2013)

Humanities Grant Initiative, NYU (2011)

Big Think Delphi Fellow (2011)

Areas of research and study

Bioethics

Epistemology

Metaphysics

Moral Psychology

Publications

Publications

‘Why Do You Ask?’ Revisiting the Purpose of Eliciting the Public’s Moral Judgments About Emerging Technologies

Lives, Limbs, and Liver Spots: The Threshold Approach to Limited Aggregation

A Right Response to Anti-Natalism

Editorial

Ethics of AI and Health Care: Towards a Substantive Human Rights Framework

Computational ethics

The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today

Ethics review of big data research: What should stay and what should be reformed?

A critique of some recent victim-centered theories of nonconsequentialism

Ethics of artificial intelligence

The moral status and rights of artificial intelligence

Designing humans: A human rights approach

Do mitochondrial replacement techniques affect qualitative or numerical identity?

Neuroscience and Ethics: Assessing Greene's Epistemic Debunking Argument Against Deontology

Précis for The Right to Be Loved

The ethics of memory modification

Acknowledgments

Are Intuitions Heuristics?

Bioethics

Biological Parenting as a Human Right

Current Controversies in Bioethics

Health (care) and human rights: a fundamental conditions approach

Human Rights and Public

Moral brains: the neuroscience of morality

Morality and Neuroscience: Past and Future