S. Matthew Liao (born 1972) is a Taiwanese-American philosopher specializing in bioethics and normative ethics. He is the Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics at New York University, where he is also the director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He has previously held appointments at Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Princeton. In addition to his many publications, Liao has written one book, The Right to Be Loved, and edited or co-edited four others. Their titles are: Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (2015), Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (2016), Current Controversies in Bioethics (2017), and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2020). He is currently writing an upcoming popular press book that analyzes the ethical dilemmas posed by near-term neurotechnologies. Liao is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy and, in 2019, he was appointed as an Elected Fellow at The Hastings Center.
Biography Liao received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude in politics from Princeton University in 1994 and then earned his D.Phil. in philosophy at Oxford University in 2001. His doctoral dissertation concerned whether children have a right to be loved and what it might consist of. He then held teaching positions at Oxford, including at its Uehiro Institute for Practical Ethics, until 2003. From 2003 to 2004, Liao was the Harold T. Shapiro Research Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. From 2004 to 2006, he served as the Greenwall Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and as a Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. From 2006 to 2009, he was the deputy director and James Martin Senior Research Fellow in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences at Oxford University. While there, he founded Ethics Etc., a group blog for discussing contemporary philosophical issues in ethics and related areas, which has received over 10 million hits since 2007. Since 2009, he has held an appointment in the Bioethics Department at New York University.
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Children's Rights and Human Rights In 2015, Liao wrote a book called The Right to Be Loved, which explores the foundations of children’s right to be loved and whether love can be an appropriate object of rights. He draws together interdisciplinary research from philosophy, human development, and neuroscience to argue that children have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a characteristically good life, and that being loved is one such condition. The book raises novel questions about the obligations that parents have toward their children and, among other things, suggests that we should reimagine public policies regarding adoption. The Right to Be Loved received Choice Review’s Outstanding Academic Title award and, in 2017, was the central focus of a summer school in Antwerp. Liao has applied insights from his work on children’s rights to broader issues of human rights and public health ethics. In his volume, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, he expands this account, arguing that having rights to the fundamental conditions also entails having rights to the means necessary to attain them. In particular, he identifies human rights to certain fundamental capacities, such as the ability to think, be motivated by facts, develop interpersonal relationships, and choose an act freely; the social institutions required to exercise those capacities; and the goods or resources necessary to sustain ourselves. Recently, Liao has extended this framework to argue that we have the human right to basic health and public health care, and outlined the responsibilities that these rights place upon governments, transnational corporations, NGOs and charities, and individual citizens.
Neuroethics Liao has written extensively about the ethical questions raised by recent advances in neurotechnology, such as psychopharmaceuticals, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and deep brain stimulation. For instance, he suggests some parents who find themselves unable to love their children might use drugs to induce those feelings in themselves. Liao argues that we already enhance our ability to feel love through a variety of non-pharmacological means, including spending more time with them, processing our reasons for antipathy, and reflecting on the role of love in human development. However, those alone are not always enough. Certain pharmacological drugs such as propranolol and oxytocin have been found enhance affiliative behavior and feelings of affection. Liao contends that, in light of children’s right to be loved, parents unable to love their children may be duty-bound to take these ‘love pills’ after other avenues are exhausted. Liao has also discussed the use of memory modification technologies (MMTs) to deaden traumatic memories and treat post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, beta blockers like propranolol can reduce the emotional strength of memories, making them consolidated less strongly in our long-term memory. Liao analyzes ways in which MMTs can harm ourselves and others, including by alienating us from our true selves, interfering with our moral agency, and forgetting important events. He makes a case on the behalf of patients with trauma, arguing that there may be times when using MMTs is permissible. He has also discussed the ethical dilemmas involved in using MMTs to make soldiers more resilient against the traumas of combat. For example, reducing the emotional impact of killing might diminish soldiers’ conscience. In 2015, Liao gave a TED Talk at CERN discussing his work on the ethics of memory modification and PTSD.
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Liao works at the forefront of the emerging field of AI ethics, having recently completed the volume Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which brings together perspectives from some of the most prominent philosophers and AI researchers on AI and morality. In 2016, he co-organized an international conference focusing on the same topic at NYU. Liao has also spoken about the implications of designing and using AI devices in healthcare settings, developing a pragmatic, rights-based framework for assessing the ethical risks of AI tools.
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