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Brian David Earp is an American philosopher, biomedical ethicist and cognitive scientist.

Earp's philosophical stances include support for transgender rights and access to gender-affirming care. He is an intactivist who opposes routine circumcision and has also written critically about the influence of religion in bioethical debates, arguing that the same rules of ethical and philosophical discourse should apply to all participants, whether religious or non-religious. His writings have also examined the ethics of relationship enhancement using drugs or other neurotechnologies, as in the example of psychedelic-assisted couples therapy. Earp has also written other topics, including free will, sex and gender and the replication crisis in psychology.

Early life

Earp grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian household. His mother was a stay-at-home mother, while his father was a X-ray technician.

Professional roles

He is Director of the Oxford-National University of Singapore (NUS) Centre for Neuroethics and Society and the EARP Lab (Experimental Bioethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Relational Moral Psychology) within the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. Earp is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Psychology at NUS by courtesy. He is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center. He is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He is an elected member of the UK Young Academy under the auspices of the British Academy and the Royal Society.

He has also worked on relational moral psychology, human enhancement, philosophy of love and children’s rights. Brian helped to establish "experimental philosophical bioethics" (bioXphi) as an area of research.

In 2019, Earp wrote his first book (co-written with Julian Savulescu), published in the UK as Love Is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships and in the United States as Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships).

Work and views

Religion

Earp was initially an evangelical Christian in his youth but no longer considers himself to be religious. He is critical of many mainstream religious practices, as well as its influence in the bioethical field, and has spoken at events hosted by the National Secular Society, including its 2019 Secularism Conference.

Relationships and drugs

His first book, Love Is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships, was written jointly with Julian Savulescu. He has argued that certain forms of medications can be ethically consumed as a "helpful complement" in relationships. Both to fall in love, and, to potentially fall out of it.

Opposition to circumcision and intersex surgeries

Earp is an intactivist and rejects the scientific consensus surrounding voluntary medical male circumcision against HIV transmission. In 2012, he supported a Cologne court ruling that briefly criminalized the religious circumcision of minors, including the Jewish Brit Milah and Islamic Khitan. He wrote that religious freedom claims should not serve as exceptions from criminal prosecutions of parents as it is "no excuse for mutilating your baby's penis". Later, he stated that he did not support criminalizing circumcision, as a pragmatic measure, until there was a change in public perception about the procedure. In 2024, Earp stated that he no longer believed that circumcision is inherently mutilative.

Earp is opposed to the large majority of intersex medical interventions on minors. He has compared both male circumcision and intersex genital alterations on minors to female genital mutilation and claims that there is ongoing ethical inconsistency among both medical organizations and the global general public on the matter.

Transgender rights movement

Earp supports transgender rights and access to gender-affirming care. He argues that restrictions on the practice are primarily from comservatives and are fundamentally about policing gender roles rather than protecting individuals.

Reception

The philosopher Wesley J. Smith has criticized Brian Earp's paper “Male or Female Genital Cutting: Why ‘Health Benefits’ are Morally Irrelevant as blurring the "crucial moral distinctions" between circumcision and female genital mutilation. Smith argues that Earp's arguments are "aimed, ultimately, at attacking religious freedom and imposing a utilitarian secularist cloak over all of society." Earp has rejected this characterization of his beliefs. Earp was nominated for the 2020 John Maddox Prize for a paper that was critical of routine circumcision. His work on the subject was praised by the judges; Anthony Fauci was the winner of the prize.

Bibliography

• Earp, Brian D.; Savulescu, Brian D. (2020). Love is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-4541-3.
• Earp, Brian D.; Chambers, Clare; Watson, Lori, eds. (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality. Routledge. ISBN 9781138370678.

Notes

References

1. ^ National University of Singapore (NUS) Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE). "Brian D. Earp". Retrieved 22 October 2024.
2. ^ Earp, Brian (2022-09-20). "Protecting Children or Policing Gender?". University of Oxford. Retrieved 2024-12-09.
3. "Circumcision as a Critical Test Case for the Value of Religious Bioethics: A Close Examination of the Writings of Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff". ResearchGate. Archived from the original on 2024-11-09. Retrieved 2024-12-19.
4. ^ Fetters, Ashley (2020-01-16). "Your Chemical Romance". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2020-10-25.
5. "Determined to Be Humble? Exploring the Relationship Between Belief in Free Will and Humility". OSF.
6. "What Is Gender For?". ResearchGate. Archived from the original on 2023-08-24. Retrieved 2024-12-19.
7. Earp, Brian D.; Trafimow, David (2015). "Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology". Frontiers in Psychology. 6: 621. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00621. PMC 4436798. PMID 26042061.
8. ^ Shane, Cari (2019-12-12). "Can We Replace Couples Therapy With Real-Life Love Potions?". OZY. Archived from the original on 2019-12-13. Retrieved 2020-10-25.
9. "Manchester University Press - Love is the Drug". Manchester University Press. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
10. Earp, Brian David; Savulescu, Julian (2020). Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships. Redwood Press. ISBN 9780804798198. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
11. Greenberg, Jon (April 18, 2016). "HIV In Africa: 6 Million Circumcisions And Counting". Politifact. Archived from the original on 2020-10-28. Retrieved 2020-10-25.
12. Zublin, Fiona (2020-01-05). "Love in the Roaring '20s". OZY. Archived from the original on 2020-01-06. Retrieved 2020-10-25.
13. ^ Szalavitz, Maia (2014-05-19). "Is It Possible to Create an Anti-Love Drug?". The Cut. Archived from the original on 2018-04-17. Retrieved 2020-10-29.
14. "Biomedical Ethics: Contributions of religion in the current biomedical debate" (PDF). Observatorio Bioetica. June 2016. Retrieved 9 December 2024.
15. "Medical ethicist Brian Earp to speak at Secularism 2019". National Secular Society. 2019-01-16. Retrieved 2024-12-19.
16. Anekwe, Lilian (February 12, 2020). "Drugs may be able to fix our romantic lives when things go wrong". New Scientist. Archived from the original on 2020-02-13. Retrieved 2020-10-29.
17. Hacker, Daphna (2017). Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization. Cambridge University Press. pp. 270–271. ISBN 978-1316508213.
18. ^ Morris, Brian J.; Barboza, Gia; Wamai, Richard G.; Krieger, John N. (2017). "Expertise and Ideology in Statistical Evaluation of Circumcision for Protection against HIV Infection". The World Journal of AIDS. 07 (3): 179–203. doi:10.4236/wja.2017.73015.
19. For sources on this, see:
    • Chikutsa A, Maharaj P (July 2015). "Social representations of male circumcision as prophylaxis against HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe". BMC Public Health. 15 (1): 603. doi:10.1186/s12889-015-1967-z. ISSN 1471-2458. PMC 4489047. PMID 26133368. It is now generally accepted in public health spheres that medical male circumcision is efficacious in the prevention of HIV infection.
    • Bell K (2016). Health and Other Unassailable Values: Reconfigurations of Health, Evidence and Ethics. Taylor & Francis. p. 106. ISBN 978-1-317-48203-1. ...defending the casual relation between male circumcision and reduced HIV transmission has become essentially hegemonic in the academic literature.
    • Merson M, Inrig S (2017). The AIDS Pandemic: Searching for a Global Response. Springer International Publishing. p. 379. ISBN 978-3-319-47133-4.
20. ^ "The Unholy Circumcision Debate". Big Think. 2012-07-27. Retrieved 2024-12-18. When a German court in Cologne ruled last month that baby boys could not be circumcised for religious reasons, Jewish and Muslim groups erupted in protest... Brian Earp applauded the decision on moral grounds... "Religion is no excuse for mutilating your baby's penis"
21. Earp, Brian (2012-06-28). "Religion does not justify mutilating your baby's penis". University of Oxford. Retrieved 2024-12-09.
22. ^ Earp, Brian. "Brian David Earp's Twitter". X (formerly Twitter). Archived from the original on 2024-12-10. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
23. ^ Smith, Wesley (2021-10-26). "Bioethicist Brian Earp Claims Allowing Circumcision Is Sexist". National Review. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
24. "Maddox Prize 2020 - Sense about Science". 14 December 2020.

• American ethicists
• Living people
• 1985 births
• 21st-century American philosophers
• Yale University faculty
• Academics of the University of Oxford
• American expatriate academics in the United Kingdom
• 21st-century American writers