Profile
Phil joined the Law School in 2003 from The University of
Sheffield, where he was a Graduate Teaching Assistant between 2000
and 2003. His first degree was in law and his postgraduate research
was primarily concerned with bioethics. The University of Sheffield
awarded him a PhD for this research in 2006, which developed a
normative framework for making judgments about decisional
competence to consent to biomedical (particularly psychiatric)
research with ‘cognitively vulnerable' participants whose
decisional competence is questionable but not necessarily absent.
He has published a monograph with Springer based on his doctoral
work.
Phil is the Director of the Biomedical
Ethics and Law Programme of the Institute of Applied Ethics at
The University of Hull. He and Dr Mary Ford of The University of
Strathclyde were Jurisprudence Subject Section Convenors for The
Society of Legal Scholars between 2005-08.
Research Interests
Research Interests
The focus of Phil's recent research is in theorizing the normative
grounds for making judgments about the decisional competence of
cognitively vulnerable people to consent to biomedical research. He
is interested in how a precautionary application of Alan Gewirth's
moral theory (the argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency)
can justify when we should judge a person to have decisional
competence, why supported decision-making is a pre-requisite for
making such judgments and the conceptual relationship between
decisional competence and other types of competences.
Phil explored these themes in his doctoral thesis, which he
recently revised for publication as a monograph, and in other
published and forthcoming work.
Phil has also published on issues of equality and vulnerability
in biomedical research ethics, and on legal education, particularly
the challenges of teaching morally contentious issues.
Beyond this, his research interests encompass four themes:
first, neuroethics, especially the ethical and legal challenges
presented by neuroscientific advances in the diagnosis and
treatment of mental disorder; second, the idea of selfhood and
vulnerability in bioethics and mental health/capacity law; third,
the relationship between the emotions, decisional competence and
legal capacity; and fourth, the moral and legal status of mentally
disordered persons. He is currently working on a paper examining
the justification of 'Ulysses arrangements' in psychiatry.
Phil is also developing research interests in law and
literature, in particular with reference to the fiction of
Jean-Paul Sartre.