Dr. Aas is a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University. He works in political philosophy and bioethics. Much of his work concerns disability – what it is; how it relates to egalitarian justice, and to health. This also includes work on some practical, applied, issues, particularly around access to and rights in prostheses and implants.
Professor Aas, while at NYU, will focus on finishing a manuscript concerning about *the body* – what it means for something (a hand, a liver, a prosthetic limb or pacemaker) to be a part of the body; what follows, morally, when something is.The book defend a view on which these questions are deeply related on which our bodies, basically, are those things that matter morally in certain specific ways (those things, specifically, in which we have a certain distinctive set of rights). What is part of our body, he argues, depends on social practices – not, only, as they are, but also as they might and (in a certain sense) *ought to* be. The book develops a contractualist account of bodily morality, to say more specifically what the body is and why it matters.
Dr. Aas is also interested in another aspect of our rights in our persons – our rights, not in our bodies, but in our *minds*. This relates to issues concerning, e.g., manipulation, mental privacy, and the disturbing possibility that new technologies (AI, neurointerventions) will allow new and concerning forms of access to our minds. But it also has a theoretical aspect: concerning whether, for instance, our rights in our minds reduce to rights in our bodies; or (more likely) whether it makes sense to think of the mind, morally, on analogy to the body, as a space with boundaries others ought not to cross.
