Tina Rulli
Description: Tina Rulli is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy department at UC Davis. She works in normative and applied ethics, and bioethics, with a focus on reproductive and population ethics, which is the area of ethics that explores what, if any, moral value there is in creating new lives. She received her PhD from Yale University and did her postdoctoral training at the NIH Bioethics Department. In this episode we explore three main topics, the ethics of adoption and procreation, anti-vaxxers and abortion rights, and the use of race in genomics. More broadly we touch on the importance of crafting strong arguments and the need to consider why an opposing opinion might be correct.
Website: Tina Rulli
Recent Publications:
Preferring a Genetically Related Child
Reproductive CRISPR Does Not Cure Disease
Can "My Body, My Choice" Anti-Vaxxers Be Pro-Life?
Resources Mentioned:
Book Recommendation:
Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit
What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill
Show Notes:
[1:12] Background/intro story
[2:10] Moral Duty to Adopt
[4:40] How do you factor declining birth-rates in the argument for the moral imperative to adopt?
[5:50] What were some of the focal points of the paper on adoption?
[9:45] How do you get people to take action on these ideas?
[10:40] Anti-Vaxxers who are pro life
[13:43] How would you respond to an anti Vader who says the abortion movement is different from anti-vax movement because it’s effect another life form
[14:28] Race and Genetics
[15:44] Color spectrum analogy
[17:18] Further elaboration of race as a social construction
[19:22] How should application of race differ in clinical vs research
[23:34] How do you determine what is important is important t when crafting a philosophical argument
[25:16] How do you come up with analogies
[26:15] What does research process look like for philosophers
[27:21] How would undergraduates get involved?
[28:05] What is the goal with these papers ?
[29:39] What is stance on gene editing/future of that field/CRISPR “debate”
[34:54] Is there a trend to neglect simple solutions because they are not as alluring as new technological solutions
[37:26] What argument holds up to scrutiny in regards to bypassing the moral “duty” to adopt
[40:15] Male equivalent?
[41:25] What advice do you have for students who want to study philosophy?
[44:50] How do you separate personal opinion from the paper
[48:24] How can you study these phenomena despite the apparent illogical nature of these arguments
[51:31] Jump back to adoption argument- does argument cease to exist if all adopted kids are adopted
[53:29] What are some of the anti-natalist arguments?
[55:43] How might the argument for adoption change when considering older children in the system
[57:30] Is there a limit to one’s moral duty to adopt?