Justin Bernstein

My research and teaching focus on bioethics and political philosophy—especially topics at their intersection.

Much of my recent work has focused on ethical and political questions that arise due to collective action problems related to health, in a very broad sense of ‘related to health.’ Some of this work focuses on particular collective action problems—especially infectious diseases and dietary patterns. For instance, what (if anything) justifies governments in implementing various vaccine mandates, shuttering non-essential businesses, or taxing red meat? What sorts of obligations do individuals have in the face of massive harms like factory farming or outbreaks of infectious diseases? More generally, I’m interested in questions about the connection (or lack thereof) between public health and public goods, what makes public health ethics different from other subfields within bioethics, and how we should integrate theories of justice or legitimacy into thinking about public health, food, and environmental policy.

A longer-term project involves developing a theory of political legitimacy that is especially well-suited to assessing the moral permissibility of particular acts of interpreting, making, or enforcing law by government officials. I contend that state legitimacy is neither necessary nor sufficient for the legitimacy of particular actions. I suggest that once we appreciate this, there’s a lot of interesting conceptual space to explore when theorizing about political morality.

Justin Bernstein CV January 2025