Ryan Kulesa

Ryan is currently a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  His work primarily focuses on areas in applied ethics (particularly medical ethics) with implications for public policy in healthcare ethics.  His dissertation focuses on the issues around moral status of various individuals, such as fetuses and temporarily comatose humans, and the question of whether such individuals have a high moral status.  Other recent work of his focuses on whether, and under what circumstances, clinicians may refuse to provide certain services.  This work has significant implications for how we ought to treat a wide range of patients, such as newborns, the temporarily comatose, and those seeking services that some providers find morally objectionable.  He will be continuing his research on both moral status and conscientious objection/medical refusals at Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics under the supervision of Alberto Giubilini from October 2023 to March 2024.

Select Publications:

Kulesa, Ryan. 2023. “The Counterfactual Argument Against Abortion.” Utilitas 35(3): 218-228.

Kulesa, Ryan. 2022. “A Defense of Conscientious Objection: Why Health is Integral to the Permissibility of Medical Refusals.” Bioethics 36(1): 54-62.