Anthony Skelton
Associate Professor
History of Ethics, Normative Ethics, Practical Ethics
BA Manitoba; MA Dalhousie;
Office: Stevenson Hall 4145
E-mail: askelto4@uwo.ca
Website: publish.uwo.ca/~askelto4
My primary research interests are in moral philosophy and its history. I have written on Sidgwick and related figures, the nature of well-being, achievement, adolescent consent and capacity, and, more recently, the ethics of mandating vaccination and of vaccinating children against COVID-19.
I am happy to supervise dissertations in the history of ethics from Kant onwards, in contemporary normative ethics, including value theory, and in meta-ethics, especially in moral epistemology.
Recent Highlights
- I was named Faculty Scholar in 2023
- I have been elected to the Editorial Committee of Utilitas, a leading journal of ethics.
- A group of students who took my ArtHum 2200 course on well-being won the Sustainable Development Goals award for their project on Well-Being and Arts Prescription at CityStudio's HUBBUB event in London, ON.
Recent Publications
Books
Consenting Children: Autonomy, Responsibility, Well-Being, edited with Lisa Forsberg, Isra Black, and Jonathan Herring (Proceedings of the British Academy, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Sidgwick’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Bioethics in Canada second edition, edited with Charles Weijer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Articles
“Transformative Choice and Decision-Making Capacity” (with Isra Black and Lisa Forsberg), Law Quarterly Review 139 (4) (2023): 654-–680.
“William David Ross”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2010; revised 2012 and 2022). (~18,250 words)
“Overriding Adolescent Refusals of Treatment” (with Lisa Forsberg and Isra Black), Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20 (3) (2021), 1–28.
Chapters
"Classical Utilitarianism and Feminism" (with Lisa Forsberg), Feminist Ethics: An Introduction to Fundamental Concepts and Current Issues, eds. Celia Edell and Charlotte Sabourin (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
"Hierarchy and Heterarchy in Ross's Theories of the Right and the Good", The Moral Philosophy of W. D. Ross, eds. Robert Audi and David Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
"Sidgwick on Free Will and Ethics", The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility, ed. Maximillian Kiener (New York: Routledge, 2023), 82–94.
Popular Pieces
“Ethical decisions: Weighing Risks and Benefits of COVID-19 Vaccination in Children Ages 5-11” , The Conversation, 1 November 2021.
“We Should Vaccinate Children Against COVID-19 in High-income Countries, Too” (with Lisa Forsberg and Isra Black), Ethics in the News, 28 August 2021.
“3 Reasons for Making COVID-19 Vaccination Mandatory for Children” (with Lisa Forsberg), The Conversation, 13 May 2021. *Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2022 Public Philosophy Op-ed Contest.*
