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Nir Eyal, DPhil

Contact Information

Until May 2010:

Harvard University
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
79 John F. Kennedy Street, Taubman
Cambridge, MA 02138

After May 2010:
Harvard Medical School
Division of Medical Ethics
641 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Email: nir_eyal@hms.harvard.edu

Nir Eyal is Assistant Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine (Medical Ethics) at the Harvard Medical School. His primary appointment is at Harvard University’s campus-wide Program in Ethics and Health. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, where he was Instructor for two years, Dr. Eyal was the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics at the Center for Human Values of Princeton University, and previously, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Clinical Bioethics of the National Institutes of Health. He holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford University, where his work was supervised by Professor G. A. Cohen, who passed away in 2009. Eyal’s earlier, Philosophy degrees are from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from Tel-Aviv University. During 2009-10 he is Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University.

Ongoing Research

Dr. Eyal is writing on ethical ways to address critical health worker shortages; on healthcare rationing in resource-poor settings; on markets in human organs; on the ethical grounds for informed consent; on personal responsibility for health; on the ethics of translational research; on measuring status-quo bias in disability-adaptation; and on accrediting corporations for improving global health. Eyal is also completing a book that defends a consequentialist approach to respect for persons and applies that approach to normative questions in bioethics and political theory. Research outside bioethics surrounds egalitarian theory, self-ownership, basic income guarantee, political domination, and consequentialism.

Publications

  • “Is the body special?” Review essay on Cécile Fabre, Whose Body is it Anyway? Utilitas 21 (2), March 2009, pp. 233-245, along with Fabre’s response.
  • “What is it like to be a bird? Wikler and Brock on the Ethics of Population Health.” In R. Green, A. Donovan & S. Jauss (eds.), Global Bioethics: Issues of Conscience for the Twenty-First Century, January 2009. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • “Coercion in the fight against medical brain drain.” Co-authored with Samia Hurst, MD. Forthcoming in R. Shah (ed.), Global Health, Justice and the Brain Drain. Palgrave McMillan.
  • “Three dilemmas for volunteer pediatric heart surgeons in Ghana.” Solicited article submitted to Journal of Clinical Ethics.
  • “Motivating prevention: from carrots and sticks to “carrots” and “sticks.”” Virtual Mentor, November 2008. Available at http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2008/11/oped1-0811.html.
  • “Utilitarianism and coercion.” Notizie di Politeia 24(90). June 2008: 108-123.
  • “Physician brain drain–can nothing be done?” Co-authored with Samia Hurst, MD. Public Health Ethics 1(2), pp. 180-192.
  • “Poverty reduction and equality with strong incentives: the brighter side of false needs.” In: J. Ryberg, T. S. Petersen & C. Wolff (eds.), New Waves in Applied Ethics. 2007. London: Palgrave-MacMillan.
  • “Egalitarian justice and innocent choice.” Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 2(1), January 2007: 1-18.
  • “If you’re an Egalitarian, how come you’re so Inegalitarian about your body?” Iyyun 55, July 2006: 299-309.
  • “‘Perhaps the most important primary good’: self-respect and Rawls’s principles of justice,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 4(2), June 2005: 195-219.
  • “Review of Susan L. Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge,” Economics and Philosophy 21, April 2005: 164-171.