Julian Savulescu

Julian Savulescu (born 22 December 1963) is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins.

He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore.

He was previously Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.

He is a former editor and current board member of the Journal of Medical Ethics (2001–2004 and 2011–2018), which is ranked as the No.2 journal in bioethics worldwide by Google Scholar Metrics, as of 2022.

In addition to his background in applied ethics and philosophy, he also has a background in medicine and neuroscience and completed his MBBS (Hons) and BMedSc at Monash University, graduating top of his class with 18 of 19 final year prizes in Medicine.

He edits the Oxford University Press book series, the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics.

He completed his PhD at Monash University, under the supervision of philosopher Peter Singer.

His doctoral thesis was on good reasons to die and euthanasia.

After graduating, he took a Menzies Foundation postdoctoral scholarship, supervised by Derek Parfit before returning to Australia.

He established a group on the ethics of genetics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Australia.

In 2002, he took up the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics in Oxford.

In 2003, he established the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics as director.

He was ASMR Gold Medalist (2005).

He was awarded the 'Thinker' Award in the top 100 Australian Future Leaders (2009), and is a Monash University Distinguished Alumni (2009).

In 2009, Professor Savulescu presented a paper at the "Festival of Dangerous Ideas", held at the Sydney Opera House in October 2009, entitled "Unfit for Life: Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction", which can be seen on Vimeo.

Savulescu argues that humanity is on the brink of disappearing in a metaphorical "Bermuda Triangle" unless humans are willing to undergo "moral enhancement".

Walter Veit has gone further than Savulescu and argued that because there is no intrinsic moral difference between "creating" and "choosing" a life, eugenics becomes a natural consequence of procreative beneficence.

If parents have a moral obligation to create children likely to have the best possible life, they should prefer to have children that have been genetically engineered for an optimal chance at such a life, even if those children bear little or no genetic relation to them.

Rebecca Bennett, however, criticises Savulescu's argument.

Bennett argues that "the chances of any particular individual being born is spectacularly unlikely, given the infinite number of variables that had to be in place for this to happen. In order for any particular individual to exist, that individual's parents have to have been created in the first place, they have to meet at the right time and conceive us at a particular time to enable that particular sperm to fuse with that particular egg. Thus, it is clear that all sorts of things, any change in society, will effect who is born."

Further, as editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, he published, in 2012, an article by two Italian academics which stated that a new-born baby is effectively no different from a foetus, is not a "person" and, morally, could be killed at the decision of the parents etc. This article was published as part of a special double issue, "Abortion, Infanticide, and Allowing Babies to Die".

The double issue included articles by Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, Jeff McMahan, C. A. J. Coady, Leslie Francis, John Finnis, and others.

In an editorial, Savulescu wrote: "The Journal aims in this issue to promote further and more extensive rational debate concerning this controversial and important topic by providing a range of arguments from a variety of perspectives. We have tried to be as inclusive as possible and provided a double issue to include as many as possible of the submissions we received. Infanticide is an important issue and one worthy of scholarly attention because it touches on an area of concern that few societies have had the courage to tackle honestly and openly: euthanasia. We hope that the papers in this issue will stimulate ethical reflection on practices of euthanasia that are occurring and its proper justification and limits."

He also stated, "I am strongly opposed to the legalisation of infanticide along the lines discussed by Giubilini and Minerva."

Along with neuroethicist Guy Kahane, Savulescu's article "Brain Damage and the Moral Significance of Consciousness" appears to be the first mainstream publication to argue that increased evidence of consciousness in patients diagnosed with being in persistent vegetative state actually supports withdrawing or withholding care.

Savulescu has a Doctoris Honoris Causa from the University of Bucharest (2014).

He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017.

He directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group and is a member of the Centre for Ethics of Pediatric Genomics in Australia.

In 2018, Savulescu and a team of co-authors were awarded the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize.

This prize recognises the author of an article or book chapter judged to provide the most innovative theoretical contribution to social/personality psychology within a given year.

He was also shortlisted for the AHRC Medal for Leadership in Medical Humanities in 2018.

He was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2023.

Savulescu coined the phrase procreative beneficence.

It is the controversial putative moral obligation of parents in a position to select their children, for instance through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), to favor those expected to have the best life.

An argument in favor of this principle is that traits (such as empathy, memory, etc.) are "all-purpose means" in the sense of being instrumental in realizing whatever life plans the child may come to have.

In some of his publications he has argued for the following:

Savulescu also justifies the destruction of embryos and foetuses as a source of organs and tissue for transplantation to adults.

In his abstract he argues,

"The most publicly justifiable application of human cloning, if there is one at all, is to provide self-compatible cells or tissues for medical use, especially transplantation. Some have argued that this raises no new ethical issues above those raised by any form of embryo experimentation. I argue that this research is less morally problematic than other embryo research. Indeed, it is not merely morally permissible but morally required that we employ cloning to produce embryos or fetuses for the sake of providing cells, tissues or even organs for therapy, followed by abortion of the embryo or fetus."

He argues that if it is permissible to destroy foetuses, for social reasons, or no reasons at all, it must be justifiable to destroy them to save lives.