Casal Ribas, Paula
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
Humanities
Short biography
Paula Casal works at UPF's Law Department, having held positions at Reading University (2004-8) and Keele University (1996-2004). She was also Fellow in Ethics at Harvard University (1999-2000), a Keele Junior Research Fellow, also at Harvard (2000-1), Hoover Fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain (2001-02), Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2002-4) and Christopher Family Fellow at Stanford University (2018). Her work has appeared in journals like Ethics, Economics and Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Journal of Political Philosophy, Hypatia, Political Studies and Utilitas. She is Associate Editor of Politics, Philosophy & Economics, and Law, Ethics and Philosophy, President of the Great Ape Project-Spain, and co-director of the UPF Center for Animal Ethics.
Research interests
My main field is distributive justice, which is a part of political philosophy that examines how social institutions should distribute benefits and burdens within a family or a nation-state, or across countries or generations. This requires assessing general principles (including equality, priority, and sufficiency) as well as policy responses (such as taxation and public spending proposals) to specific problems like gender inequality, local and global poverty or climate change. I have written from a biologically-informed perspective about gender, nonhuman animals, personhood and the distinction between natural and social inequality. I have also written about more specific issues, such as how to distribute the costs of child-rearing, the right to sea-access for landlocked states, the moral limits on religious and cultural accommodation, xenotransplantation and the Non-Identity Problem, and the distinction medical ethicists draw between therapy and enhancement.