Olsaretti, Serena – ICREA Memoir 2021

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

– “Egalitarian Justice, Population Size and Parents´ Responsibility for the Costs of Children”, in The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics, edited by G Arrnehius, K Bykvist, T Campbell and E Finneron-Burns (Oxford University Press, 2021)

– “The Family and Justice in Political Philosophy”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2021)

– “Equality of Opportunity and Justified Inequalities: How the Family Can Be on Equality´s Side”, in Reason, Justification and Contractualism: Themes from Scanlon, edited by W. K. Essler, D. Føllesdal, and M. Frauchiger (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021)

– “A Non-Remedial Case for a Temporary Migration Package?”, Law, Ethics and Philosophy 9 (2021)

Selected research activities

Associate Editor, Ethics.

Project Editor, Social Philosophy and Policy.

Keynote Speaker at the XI Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy, University of Minho.

Invited Speaker at the University of Warwick; University College London; Panthéon Sorbonne; the University of Oxford; the University of Southern Denmark.

Co-organiser and Speaker (with P Bou-Habib), Panel on The Rights of the Family in the Context of Immigration, Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference.

Reviewer for Oxford University Press; Journal of Politics; Social Theory and Practice.

Reviewer, Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Programme, Harvard University.

Reviewer, Ikerbasque Programme.

Member of Evaluation Panel, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal.