Hilary Bok is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Bioethics and Moral & Political Theory at the Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

. Bok received a B.A. in Philosophy from Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1981 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1991.

She served as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College

Pomona College

Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.The founding member...

 from 1997 to 2000. Bok was also a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values from 1994 to 1995. Her areas of specialization are bioethics

Bioethics

Bioethics is the study of controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, and philosophy....

, moral philosophy, free will

Free will

"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...

, and the works of Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

. She is a faculty member of the Berman Institute of Bioethics. Bok is the author of Freedom and Responsibility (1998), a Kantian critique of libertarian

Libertarianism (metaphysics)

Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism, which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position, argues that free will is logically incompatible with a...

 theories of free will. More recently, she has written extensively about stem cell research, most notably in The Lancet

The Lancet

The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world's best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals...

.

Her parents are the well-known academics Derek Bok and Sissela Bok

Sissela Bok

Sissela Bok, born 2 December 1934, is a Swedish-born philosopher and ethicist, the daughter of two Nobel Prize winners: Gunnar Myrdal who won the Economics prize with Friedrich Hayek in 1974, and Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982....

 and her maternal grandparents were the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal

Gunnar Myrdal

Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish Nobel Laureate economist, sociologist, and politician. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the...

 and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal

Alva Myrdal

Alva Myrdal was a Swedish sociologist and politician. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She married Gunnar Myrdal in 1924....

, both Nobel laureates. Her paternal grandparents were the distinguished Pennsylvania jurist Curtis Bok

Curtis Bok

William Curtis Bok was a Pennsylvania jurist, philanthropist and writer. Heir to an enormous fortune, he was also a devout Quaker and an avid sailor.-Biography:...

, and Margaret Plummer Bok http://www.bookrags.com/biography/derek-curtis-bok/.

Bok blogged under the pseudonym "hilzoy" at the well-known blogs "Obsidian Wings" and "Political Animal" (the blog of The Washington Monthly

The Washington Monthly

The Washington Monthly is a bimonthly nonprofit magazine of United States politics and government that is based in Washington, D.C.The magazine's founder is Charles Peters, who started the magazine in 1969 and continues to write the "Tilting at Windmills" column in each issue. Paul Glastris, former...

magazine). On July 13, 2009, Bok announced her retirement from blogging.

External links

• Bok's page at Johns Hopkins University
• Princeton University Press page on Freedom and Responsibility
• Bok's page at Berman Institute of Bioethics
• "Justice, ethnicity, and stem-cell banks" co-written with Kathryn Schill and Ruth Faden
  Ruth Faden
  Ruth R. Faden, M.P.H., Ph.D., is the Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Executive Director of The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.She has...
  
  , The Lancet, July 10, 2004 v364 i9429 p118 retrieved 17 December 2005