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. My current research focuses mostly on issues concerning justice and the family. One of these is what society owes the family for its role in securing demographic replacement. A book I am working on, titled Parental Justice, asks what a fair distribution of the costs and benefits of children is, between parents, non parents and across generations. Other issues my on work tackles are how liberal states should respond to procreation and migration as two sources of demographic renewal; what normative assumptions underpin estimates of the carbon footprint of procreation which environmental scientists provide; whether parents' partiality towards their children can be reconciled with equality of opportunity. Some of this work also contributes to foundational debates on how to understand the demands of equality, on exploitation and on the principle of fair play. In the past I have worked on freedom; equality; desert; well-being; responsibility.
Selected publications
- Bou-Habib, P & Olsaretti, S 2023, ´Uniform Inheritance: The Argument from Liberal Neutrality´, Raisons politiques 92, 4, 69-83.
Selected research activities
- Invited speaker at Ashoka University; Dartmouth University; University of Vermont
- Organiser (with I Trifan) of Panel on Climate Justice and the Carbon Footprint of Procreation, Society for Applied Philosophy conference, 30 June-2 July 2023
- Associate editor, Ethics; Law, Ethics & Philosophy
- Editorial board: Journal of Applied Philosophy; Economics and Philosophy; Utilitas
- External evaluator, University of Toronto; Fundació La Caixa
- Investigador garante (with JJ Moreso) of subproject on Evidence, Politics and the Public Sphere, Maria de Maeztu Grant for the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy