Professor Christian Munthe

Christian Munthe, Ph.D. is Professor of Practical Philosophy and Associate Head of Department for Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
 
His research is mainly about ethics, value, and policy issues arising in the intersection of health, science & technology, the environment, and society. In his latest book, The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk, he develops a novel theory of the ethics of the societal management of environmental and technological risks and applies it to a number of practical areas. This fall, he will also publish a book on the ethics of screening in medicine (coauthored with Niklas Juth), The Ethics of Screening in Health Care and Medicine: Serving Society or Serving the Patient?
 
During recent years, Christian has also published a string of papers connecting to projects on the ethics of so-called person centered care and shared decision making, forensic psychiatry, and related legal systems and public health. The subject of his dissertation was the morality of abortion and, after that, he published books, papers, and chapters on the ethical aspects of prenatal diagnosis and preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
 
His research interests also include “pure” moral and political philosophy, and continue to expand. While still including health care ethics and bioethics, he has recently worked on the notion of the best interest of children, the nature of secular societies, the moral implications of disability and the values of higher education. In essence, he’s very much cross-disciplinary in his approach, and has often collaborated with scientists, practitioners, and/or scholars from other fields. He likes his philosophy to connect to practice and be informed by empirical research as much as he likes it to contain theoretical depth and development.
 
Christian earned his Ph.D. in practical philosophy at Stockholm University in 1993. After an extended postdoc stay at the Centre for Research Ethics in Gothenburg, he became Associate Professor of practical philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Gothenburg in 1998, and full professor in 2004. During 2006–2008, he was Prefekt (Head of Department) of The Department of Philosophy and, since 2009, he is Associate Head of Department for Research, responsible for research in The Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science. He was an appointed member of the Swedish National Council for Medical Ethics from 2000 to 2006, and is currently a member of the International Association of Bioethics, the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg, and The Hinxton Group – An International Consortium on Stem Cells, Ethics & Law, and member of the editorial board of the journal Bioethics.
 
Read his Academia.edu profile and his LinkedIn profile. Read his blog Philosophical Comment. Follow his Twitter feed.