Visiting Faculty Fellow, 2007-08

Founding Director of the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University, United Kingdom.

Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Research Director, Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, Keele University.

Professor Dawson’s research interests are in Public Health Ethics, Informed Consent: The Empirical and the Normative, and The Regulation of Professional Conduct. During his fellowship year, Dawson will focus on his work in public health ethics; he aims to complete a book-length work entitled Vaccination Ethics, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. This work will explore normative and conceptual questions such as the nature of prevention; the distinction between collective, common and public goods; and the difference between public health interventions aimed at particular groups and those aimed at individuals.

Dawson is editor or co-editor of three books in health care ethics that have appeared in 2007: Ethics, Prevention, and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2007); Principles of Health Care Ethics (Wiley, 2007); and The Philosophy of Public Health (Ashgate, forthcoming 2007). He is also the author of dozens of articles on informed consent, public health ethics, and applied ethics more generally. He is joint editor-in-chief of Public Health Ethics, a new international peer-reviewed journal to be published by Oxford University Press. The first issue will appear in April 2008.

Dawson studied for his first degree in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, and then for an MSc in Health Care Ethics at the University of Liverpool. He then studied law for a year at the College of Law in Chester, before returning to postgraduate study in the Department of Philosophy at Manchester University where he completed his PhD (a discussion of the methodological foundations of applied ethics). Dawson has been at Keele University since 1998, having taught previously at the Universities of Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester.