Jeremy Williams

I joined the Philosophy Department at Birmingham in September 2011 - first as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and then, from January 2013, as a Birmingham Research Fellow. During my Leverhulme Fellowship, I was a visiting scholar at the Philosophy Department at Rutgers (Fall 2012), and at the Center of Bioethics at NYU (Spring 2013). I have also previously taught at the University of Reading (2009-10) and the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, King's College London (2010-11).

I am especially interested in the fields of bioethics, the ethics of killing, and liberal political theory. I have previously written on subjects including abortion, prenatal screening, procreative ethics, and the allocation of dispositional rights in bodily material.

My current research is about public reason liberalism and its practical implications - especially in relation to the political questions which Rawls called the 'problems of extension'. Public reason views, I argue, handle these sorts of questions badly, giving us cause to reject them, in favour of a 'comprehensive' or 'ethical' liberal position. You can find some of my ideas about these issues in my most recent publications, here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/philosophy/williams-jeremy.aspx.