Robert Baker

Areas of interest

Robert Baker is William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy at Union College (Emeritus) and is Professor of Bioethics and Founding Director (Emeritus) of the Clarkson University-Icahn-Mount Sinai Bioethics program. He earned his BA with Honors in History from City College of New York, a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota and was a post-doctoral fellow at Albany Medical College. He serves on the editorial board of Bioethics, was a four-time National Endowment for the Humanities awardee, and is a Hastings Center Fellow. He has written, edited, or co-edited over a dozen books including, The American Medical Ethics Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics (Cambridge University Press): each was cited in the year of its publication by Choice, journal of the American Library Association, as “outstanding book of the year in health sciences.” Baker served as consultant to the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities committee that developed an ethics code for healthcare ethics consultants and co-authored a report prompting the board of the American Medical Association to apologize publicly for its past treatment of African American physicians. Oxford University Press published his most recent book, Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics. His current book project, The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of the Changing Morality of Abortion, Death and the Bioethics Revolution is being published by MIT Press in 2019.