Professor of Biomedical Ethics
Bioethics Centre, Division of Health Sciences
University of Dunedin, New Zealand

Research

My research ranges quite widely in Bioethics, philosophy, and neuroscience. In Bioethics I work on end of life care, complementary and alternative medicine, autonomy, and the patient's journey. In Neuroethics I have written widely on brain birth, brain death, PVS, and minimally conscious states, and issues of free will identity and responsibility.

My work in neuroethics arose from research in Philosophy of psychiatry focusing on the nature of mental disorder, psychopathy, and dissociative disorders. I examine these topics through Post-structuralist philosophy, an exploration of the patient's voice, post-colonialism, and human subjectivity and I have authored Subjectivity and being somebody: neuroethics and human identity, Bioethics in the Clinic (Johns Hopkins University Press) The mind and its discontents (Oxford Univ Press) Reasonable Care (Bristol Press), Representation, Meaning and Thought (Oxford University Press) and co-authored The Discursive Mind (Sage) as well as numerous articles in a variety of international journals such as Philosophy, British Medical Journal, Lancet, Philosophical Psychology, Inquiry, Mind, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of medicine and Philosophy, Consciousness and cognition, Brain, Philosophy, psychiatry and psychology, and Bioethics.