Professor Emeritus
Email: JLAGarcia@aol.com
Normative moral theory, including the concepts of goodness, desert, and virtue, and on articulating and defending a "virtues-based, role-centered, and patient-focused" moral theory, while critiquing consequentialist and other alternatives. Bioethical issues as euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, artificial nutrition and hydration, and ethnic perspectives on medical ethics.
After earning the doctorate at Yale, J. L. A. Garcia was Associate Professor in the philosophy departments of Notre Dame and Georgetown universities, Professor at Rutgers/New Brunswick, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and Visiting Professor in MIT鈥檚 Department of Linguistics & Philosophy. He was Professor in Boston College鈥檚 Philosophy Department from 2000 till retiring in 2022.Garcia has published articles, chapters, & entries on a variety of topics in normative ethical theory, metaethics, medical ethics, philosophical theory of society, and at the intersection of philosophy and Black studies. Some principal venues include American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, and Philosophical Studies (USA), as well as Mind (UK), Synthese and Erkenntnis (Europe), Philosophia (Israel), Dialogos and Critica (central America), and Philosophical Papers (Africa). His article, 鈥淭he Heart of Racism鈥 has been widely reprinted, including in French and German translations.Garcia has also served on the American Philosophical Association鈥檚 Committee on Hispanics, chaired its Committee on Philosophy and the Black Experience, and was a member of its Eastern Division鈥檚 executive board. He鈥檚 been on the Society of Christian Philosophers鈥 executive board; was vice-president of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy in NYC; and council member, vice-president, and president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.Garcia鈥檚 research won stipendiary postdoctoral support from the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Harvard鈥檚 Program in Ethics & the Professions (now its Safra Center), and Boston University鈥檚 erstwhile Institute for the Study of Race & Social Division, and he was nonresident fellow in Harvard鈥檚 DuBois Institute for African & African American Research. He has consulted for the Smithsonian Institution, NEH, National Institutes of Health鈥檚 Center for Scientific Review, National Academy of Sciences(& its National Research Council), US Department of Education, the Educational Testing Service, the European Research Council,聽and the European Science Foundation's Community of Experts,聽among others.
Health versus Harm: Euthanasia and Physicians' Duties,"聽Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, forthcoming.
"Being Unimpressed with Ourselves: Reconceiving Humility,"聽Philosophia, forthcoming.
"Racial and Ethnic Identity?" in聽Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, edited by J. J. E. Gracia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), forthcoming.
"Revisiting African-American Perspectives and Medical Ethics," in聽African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity, edited by Lawrence Prograis & Edmund Pellegrino (Washington: Georgetown University Press), 2007.
"Practical Reason and Its Virtues," in聽Intellectual Virtue, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 81-107.