Serena Olsaretti

Serena Olsaretti

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Humanities

I have been an ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 2010, where I am a member of the Law & Philosophy research group and of the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy.  I have been an elected member of the Academia Europaea since 2019. Prior to joining ICREA I was Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St. John's College (2001-2010). I had first arrived at Cambridge in 1999, as a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, after studying at the University of Oxford between 1990 and 1999. At Oxford I obtained a B.A., an M.Phil. and a DPhil.degree.

Research interests

My research is in moral and political philosophy. I am currently working on a book on the fair distribution of the costs and benefits of children, provisionally titled Parental Justice, which draws on research done between 2015 and 2021 as the PI of an ERC Consolidator project on "Justice and the Family. An Analysis of the Normative Significance of Procreation and Parenthood in a Just Society". I hold we need to address relatively neglected questions concerning the responsibilities and rights of procreators and parents in a just society in order to develop a complete and defensible theory of justice. Recently I have begun to examine how liberal states should respond to procreation and migration as two sources of demographic renewal. In the past I have worked on the ethics of markets, the ideal of liberty, egalitarianism and responsibility and theories of well-being. 

Selected publications

- Olsaretti S 2022, 'Why Socialising the Costs of Children is Fair to Parents: A Rejoinder to Hohl', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 50, 4, 413-429.

- Olsaretti S & Gheaus A 2022. 'Justice and the Family', in Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy Section: Justice, ed. Prof. Dr. John Tasioulas. Springer, Dordrecht.

Selected research activities

Keynote speaker, German Society for Analytic Philosophy Annual Conference, Berlin 

Invited speaker, University of Manchester; University of Rotterdam; University of Zurich

Associate editor, Ethics

Evaluator for promotions & appointments at the University of Durham; University of Warwick; Texas State University; Princeton University 

Evaluator for research grants for the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Programme, Harvard University; Austrian Science Fund (FWF)