Dr Gabriele Badano
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Gabriele Badano is an analytical political philosopher and a normative political theorist. His main research interests include liberal theories of public justification of political decisions, the place of science in democratic societies, the theoretical problems raised by the task of countering the rise of illiberal and antidemocratic views, and issues of justice in resource allocation and other dimensions of health policy.

Before taking up his position at York in 2018, Gabriele held a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where he was based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities and at Girton College. Gabriele holds a PhD from the Department of Philosophy at University College London as well as an MA and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Genoa, Italy.

He is interested in supervising PhD students in political philosophy and normative political theory, especially but not exclusively in the research areas that are mentioned above.

Research

Overview

Gabriele’s current research is focused primarily on the role that science should play in liberal democratic societies, spanning scientific advisors to government, scientific researchers, and science journalists. In this area, he concentrates in particular on the challenges posed by the unavoidably value-laden nature of scientific practice, drawing on and developing elements of John Rawls’s public reason liberalism to put together an appealing normative view of the limits scientific advisors to government, researchers, and science journalists should observe. Among other things, he is preparing a monograph on these topics, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Gabriele has a long-standing interest in the framework of public reason above and beyond his work on science. In essence, public reason requires that political decisions be justifiable across widely different religious, philosophical, and to some extent even political doctrines. Gabriele and fellow Department member Alasia Nuti are in the process of concluding a project bringing Rawlsian public reason liberalism to bear on how liberal democratic societies should fight illiberal and antidemocratic views without themselves contradicting any core liberal democratic commitments. In this project, they focus on the responsibilities of common citizens, political parties, cities, and the media in the face of democratic backsliding. In 2024, this project led to a monograph with OUP.

For his published papers, see here.

Available PhD research projects

Gabriele welcomes PhD applications in the following areas:

• Analytical political philosophy
• Normative political theory

Publications

Selected publications

Monographs

• Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), with Alasia Nuti.

Peer-reviewed articles

• “Moving Beyond Contestation: What Is the Way Ahead for the Values in Science Debate?”, Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
• “Public Reason, Values in Science, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Political Forum”, Philosophical Studies, 182 (2025): 1133-1155.
• “Must the Subaltern Speak Publicly? Public Reason Liberalism and the Ethics of Fighting Severe Injustice”, The Journal of Politics, 87 (2025): 190-204 (with Alasia Nuti).
• “We Need to Talk about Values: A Proposed Framework for the Articulation of Normative Reasoning in Health Technology Assessment”, Health Economics, Policy and Law, 19 (2024): 153-173 (with Victoria Charlton, Michael DiStefano, Polly Mitchell, Liz Morrell, Leah Rand, Rachel, Michael Calnan, Kalipso Chalkidou, Anthony Culyer, Daniel Howdon, Dyfrig Hughes, James Lomas, Catherine Max, Christopher McCabe, James F. O'Mahony, Mike Paulden, Zack Pemberton-Whiteley, Annette Rid, Paul Scuffham, Mark Sculpher, Koonal Shah, Albert Weale, and Gry Wester).
• “Public Reason, Partisanship, and the Containment of the Populist Radical Right”, Political Studies, 71 (2023): 198–217 (with Alasia Nuti).
• “Rescuing Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement”, Law and Philosophy, 39 (2020): 35-65 (with Matteo Bonotti).
• “The Principle of Restraint: Public Reason and the Reform of Public Administration”, Political Studies, 68 (2020): 110-127.
• “The Limits of Conjecture: Political Liberalism, Counter-Radicalisation, and Unreasonable Religious Views”, Ethnicities, 20 (2020): 293-311 (with Alasia Nuti).
• “Equality, Liberty and the Limits of Person-Centred Care's Principle of Co-Production”, Public Health Ethics, 12 (2019): 176–187.
• “Substance in Bureaucratic Procedures for Healthcare Resource Allocation: A Reply to Smith”, The Journal of Medical Ethics, 45 (2019): 75-76.
• “Under Pressure: Political Liberalism, the Rise of Unreasonableness and the Complexity of Containment”, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 26 (2018): 145-168 (with Alasia Nuti).
• “If You’re a Rawlsian, How Come You’re So Close to Utilitarianism and Intuitionism? A Critique of Daniels’s Accountability for Reasonableness”, Health Care Analysis, 26 (2018): 1-16.
• “Still Special, despite Everything: A Liberal Defence of the Value of Healthcare in the Face of the Social Determinants of Health”, Social Theory and Practice, 42 (2016): 183-204.
• “On the Moral Importance of Numbers, Relevance and the Workings of Non-Aggregative Reasoning”, Ethical Perspectives, 23 (2016): 527-543.
• “Public Participation in Decision-Making on the Coverage of New Antivirals for Hepatitis C”, Journal of Health Organization and Management, 30 (2016): 769-785 (with Katharina Kieslich, Jeonghoon Ahn, Kalipso Chalkidou, Leonardo Cubillos, Renata Curi, Chris Henshall, Carleigh Krubiner, Peter Littlejohns, Lanting Lu, Steven Pearson, Annette Rid, Jennifer Whitty, James Wilson).
• “Political Liberalism and the Justice Claims of the Disabled: A Reconciliation”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 17 (2014): 401-422.

Book chapters

• “Political Liberal Self-Defence: A Further Specification of a Normative Model”, in The Oxford Handbook of Democratic Self-Defence, ed. by A. Malkopoulou, C. Rovira-Kaltwasser, and B. Rijpkema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
• “Unreasonable People and Democracy”, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of John Rawls, ed. by C. Hartley, B. Neufeld, and L. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), co-authored with Alasia Nuti.
• “Are Numbers Really as Bad as They Seem? A Political-Philosophy Perspective”, in Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification, ed. by A. Alexandrova, S. John and C. Newfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
• “NICE's Cost-Effectiveness Threshold, or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and (Almost) Love the £20,000-£30,000/QALY Figure”, in Measurement in Medicine: Philosophical Essays on Assessment and Evaluation, ed. by L. McClimans (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), co-authored with Stephen John and Trenholme Junghans.

Drafts of Gabriele’s published papers

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Introduction to Political Theory
• Justice, Equality, and Difference
• Empire, War, and Law
• Topics in Philosophy, Politics and Economics
• Ethics and Public Policy

Postgraduate

• Justice, Legitimacy and Democracy