My time is now up - thanks everyone for the questions!

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Samantha Brennan grew up on the east coast of Canada graduating from Charles P. Allen High School in Bedford, Nova Scotia in 1982. She studied at King’s College and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia moving from Journalism to Political Science and then to Philosophy. Brennan did her PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago, working with Shelly Kagan who supervised her dissertation, “Thresholds for Rights.” In 1993 started work at Western University as an Assistant Professor. Brennan was Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 2002-2007 and 2008-2011. She is now Professor of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research and keeping up her tradition of wandering around academic disciplines has graduate supervisory status in Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Philosophy. Brennan is also a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western and is a currently a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics.

Over the course of her career, Brennan has produced a body of scholarship that spans a wide range of areas in normative theory and applied ethics. Known for her contributions to normative ethics and to feminist philosophy, Brennan has produced scholarship in three main areas: moderate deontology and thresholds for rights; children’s rights and family justice; feminist ethics and inequality. In addition, Brennan’s work covers such as themes as gender identity, fashion, the moral significance of human mortality, and sports ethics.

Her work on a moderate account of rights, that is non-absolute rights, or rights that can be overridden when a great deal is at stake, began early in her career. Specifying under what conditions a right can be overridden is a project that has spanned many refereed journal articles and book chapters. Brennan’s work is frequently cited in debates between consequentialist and non-consequentialist approaches to ethic as evidence for the claim that a middle ground is possible.

When Brennan argued for a moderate account of rights one of the claims she made was that non-absolute rights are more flexible moral tools better able to do work in intimate settings such as the family. With her work on children’s rights, parent’s rights, and family justice, she set out to make good on that claim. It is this body of work for which Brennan is best known. Brennan’s paper, “The moral status of children: Children's rights, parents' rights, and family justice,” co-written with Robert Noggle has been cited more than 120 times. Her work on children’s rights and parental obligations resulted in two edited volumes and a series of highly influential papers. Brennan’s work was part of the resurgence of interest in the family by philosophers and this work helped set the stage for what is now a flourishing area of philosophical scholarship. Most recently Brennan is part of a group of philosophers writing on the intrinsic goods of childhood, urging philosophers and others writing about ethical obligations to children to take childhood more seriously.

Brennan’s recent research on micro-inequities sets out to develop the idea that small wrongs can be morally significant when they add up to large harms. Brennan develops this idea in the context of moral theory and applies to workplace and university settings to help understand barriers to inclusion and diversity. This scholarship connects her earlier work on moral aggregation and value theory to her practical commitment to improving the situation of women in Philosophy. Improving the situation for women, and others marginalized in the field, was a priority during her eight year term as Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Western University. Brennan was a founding member of the Women in Philosophy task force, an active member of the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Equity Committee, and a board member of the International Association of Women in Philosophy (IAPh). Brennan’s work equity and inclusion led to an invitation to be a member of the Implicit Bias & Philosophy International Research Project. She underwent training as part of the APA Site Visitor program and has participated in the climate assessment program. Brennan started the very successful Southwestern Ontario Feminist Philosophers Workshop. She is also a founder and co-editor of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, a peer reviewed, online, open access journal.

Brennan has a strong international research profile owing in part to her visiting fellowships at The Australian National University and the University of Otago. Starting in January 2017, Brennan began a Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. Brennan also has a long standing commitment to public engagement. She has been frequently interviewed on radio. Most recently her work on sports ethics led to her being interviewed in the New York Times. She’s been a participant in a CBC Ideas series with moral philosophers. In addition, Brennan maintains an extremely active presence on social media across a wide range of platforms. Brennan has been blogging since the very first days of blogs and though not an explicitly academic blog, her blog Fit is Feminist Issue, reaches thousands of readers and connects them with feminist ideas. It was recently profiled in Canadian Living’s January 2017 issue.

Brennan has also supervised more than a dozen PhD students in a wide range of areas. She has frequently co-written with many of her students and has ongoing research relationships with them.

Currently Vice-President of the Canadian Philosophical Association Brennan will become President in June 2017. She has also been an active member of the American Philosophical Association working on two committees, the Public Philosophy Committee and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trans* Philosophers Committee.

Some Links of Interest

• APA Member Interview

• Public Ethics Radio episode on microinequalities

• Talk entitled "Thinking Philosophically About the Family"

• Blog post on "Rethinking the Moral Significance of Extended Family Relationships"

• "The Moral Status of Micro-Inequities", an essay on the ethics of workplace inequality

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My time is now up - thanks everyone for the questions!