Ben Davies

School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities

Lecturer in Political Philosophy

Reading Weekend Organiser

ben.davies@sheffield.ac.uk

45 Victoria Street

Full contact details

Ben Davies
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
45 Victoria Street
Sheffield
S3 7QB

Profile: Ben joined the Department of Philosophy in September 2023 as Lecturer in Political Philosophy. Before that, he was a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, as well as teaching in Leeds and the US. He studied at King’s College London and the University of Edinburgh.

Research interests

Ben is primarily interested in the ethics and politics of health care. In the past, this has included topics such as intergenerational justice; patient and practitioner responsibility; and the idea of ‘sufficiency’ in health provision. He is now developing work on how democratic health priority-making decisions should be, and what this would look like in practice. He is interested in working with people who work in healthcare priority-setting at any level.

As well as this central focus, Ben has research interests in:

Ageing
Animal ethics
Autonomy
Disability, especially its challenge to mainstream ethics and political theory
Discrimination
Professional ethics
Satisficing
Well-being and prudence

He is happy to hear from MA and PhD students interested in these topics, or other topics in bioethics broadly construed.

Publications

Edited books

Davies B, Levy N, De Marco G & Savulescu J (Eds.) (2024) Responsibility and Healthcare. Oxford University PressOxford.

Journal articles

Davies B (2023) Medical need and health need. Clinical Ethics, 18(3), 287-291.
Davies B (2023) Healthcare Priorities: The “Young” and the “Old”. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 32(2), 174-185.
Zohny H, Davies B & Wilkinson D (2022) Affirmative action in healthcare resource allocation: Vaccines, ventilators and race. Bioethics, 36(9), 970-977.
Davies B (2022) The Prospects for ‘Prospect Utilitarianism’. Utilitas, 34(3), 335-343.
Davies B & Parker J (2022) Doctors as Appointed Fiduciaries: A Supplemental Model for Medical Decision-Making. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 31(1), 23-33.
Davies B (2022) Responsibility and the recursion problem. Ratio, 35(2), 112-122.
Davies B (2021) ‘Personal Health Surveillance’: The Use of mHealth in Healthcare Responsibilisation. Public Health Ethics, 14(3), 268-280.
Davies B (2021) Grow the pie, or the resource shuffle? Commentary on Munthe, Fumagalli and Malmqvist. Journal of Medical Ethics, 47(2), 98-99.
Davies B & Savulescu J (2021) The Right Not to Know: some Steps towards a Compromise. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 24(1), 137-150.
Davies B & Savulescu J (2020) From Sufficient Health to Sufficient Responsibility. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 17(3), 423-433.
Parker J & Davies B (2020) No Blame No Gain? From a No Blame Culture to a Responsibility Culture in Medicine. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 37(4), 646-660.
Davies B (2020) ‘The right not to know and the obligation to know’, response to commentaries. Journal of Medical Ethics, 46(5), 309-310.
Davies B (2020) The right not to know and the obligation to know. Journal of Medical Ethics, 46(5), 300-303.
Davies B (2020) Responsibility and the limits of patient choice. Bioethics, 34(5), 459-466.
Davies B & Savulescu J (2019) Solidarity and Responsibility in Health Care. Public Health Ethics, 12(2), 133-144.
DAVIES BEN (2019) Bursting Bubbles? QALYs and Discrimination. Utilitas, 31(2), 191-202.
Davies B (2018) Ageing and Terminal Illness: Problems for Rawlsian Justice. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 35(4), 775-789.
Davies B & Felappi G (2017) Publish or Perish. Metaphilosophy, 48(5), 745-761.
Davies B (2017) Paternalism and Evaluative Shift. Moral Philosophy and Politics, 4(2), 325-346.
Davies B (2017) Enhancement and the Conservative Bias. Philosophy & Technology, 30(3), 339-356.
Davies B (2016) Fair Innings and Time-Relative Claims. Bioethics, 30(6), 462-468.
Davies B (2015) Justice Between the Young and the Old. SOCIOLOGICKY CASOPIS-CZECH SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 51(3), 562-566.
Davies B () War on All Fronts: A Theory of Health Security Justice By Nicholas G.Evans, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2023. pp. 258. $45.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780262545433. Bioethics.
Davies B () Disability discrimination in emergencies: The return of Taurek?. Ethic@: an International Journal for Moral Philosophy.
Davies B & Parker J () Deference or critical engagement: How should healthcare practitioners use Clinical Ethics Guidance?. Monash Bioethics Review.
Davies B () What Do ‘Humans’ Need? Sufficiency and Pluralism. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 1-18.
Davies B () A new paradox for well-being subjectivism. Analysis.
Moriarty CM & Davies B () Feeding Infants: Choice-Specific Considerations, Parental Obligation, and Pragmatic Satisficing. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
Park JK & Davies B () Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination during COVID-19: A Conceptual Map. The American Journal of Bioethics, 1-14.
Davies B & Savulescu J () Institutional Responsibility is Prior to Personal Responsibility in a Pandemic. The Journal of Value Inquiry.
Davies B () Utilitarianism and Animal Cruelty: Further Doubts. De Ethica, 3(3), 5-19.

Chapters

Davies B & Douglas T (2022) Learning to Discriminate: The Perfect Proxy Problem in Artificially Intelligent Criminal Sentencing In Ryberg J & Roberts JV (Ed.), Sentencing and Artificial Intelligence

Research group: Please get in touch if you are interested in being supervised in topics in political philosophy and applied ethics, especially related to health and health care, broadly construed.

Teaching activities

PHI350/PHI6009 Global Justice (Autumn)

PHI21001 Topics in Political Philosophy (Spring)