AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

I'm a philosopher (obviously), legal scholar, and literary critic, and a widely published essayist and commentator. I've enjoyed a career in academia, public policy management, and the legal profession, and since the 1980s, I've also built an international profile as a writer and editor. I've retired from full-time paid employment, but I continue to be active in research and writing. These days, I am grateful to have an honorary appointment at the University of Newcastle as Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy. My formal qualifications include an LLB with First Class Honours from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in philosophy from Monash University, where my doctoral dissertation applied ideas from liberal theory and philosophy of law to topical issues in debate over bioethics. My doctoral dissertation was entitled Human Enhancement: The Challenge to Liberal Tolerance. A revised and expanded version of this was published by MIT Press as Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies. I'm the author, co-author, or co-editor of numerous other books, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as book chapters, academic articles, op-eds, short stories, and book reviews. My most recent books are The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement (Schwabe Verlag, 2021), and How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). For contributions to humanist thought, I was inducted in 2014 into the International Academy of Humanism. Areas of academic specialization and competence: Legal, moral, and political philosophy in general; philosophical bioethics (especially relating to emerging technologies and human enhancement); constitutional law and theory (particularly but not solely Australia); philosophy of religion. I'm currently under contact to write a critical thinking textbook for the American academic publisher Hackett, with a particular slant involving the ethics of public discussion.