Profile
Biography
Gabriele Badano is a political philosopher and a normative political theorist. His main research interests include liberal theories of public justification of political decisions, the task of countering the rise of illiberal and antidemocratic views in society without contradicting the basic commitments of liberal democracy, the theoretical challenges raised by scientific advice to policymakers, and issues of justice and fairness 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 Genova, 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 includes a joint project with fellow Department member Alasia Nuti, which has recently led to a monograph with Oxford University Press. In this project, they draw on and develop elements of John Rawls’s framework of political liberalism to illuminate how liberal democratic societies should fight illiberal and antidemocratic views without themselves contradicting any core liberal democratic commitments.
Gabriele has a long-standing interest in the framework of public reason, which in essence requires that political decisions be justifiable across widely different religious, philosophical, and to some extent even political doctrines. Among other things, he is working on how to extend this framework so as to include a close focus on public administrators and scientific advisors to government. In this area, he explores issues including what public reasoning should look like specifically for those actors, and how public administration and scientific advisory agencies should be designed so as to protect the ability of their members to provide authentically public reasons.
Gabriele also plans to continue looking at issues in health policy, for example as case studies for his work on the political philosophy of public administration.
For his published papers and some work in progress, see here.
Available PhD research projects
Dr Gabriele Badano welcomes PhD applications in the following areas:
- Analytical political philosophy
- Normative political theory
Publications
Selected publications
Gabriele’s publications include:
Monographs
- Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), with Alasia Nuti.
Peer-reviewed articles
- “Public Reason, Values in Science, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Political Forum”, Philosophical Studies, forthcoming.
- “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
- “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
