Frances Kamm
Frances Myrna Kamm is an American philosopher specializing in normative and applied ethics. Kamm is currently the at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She is also the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy Emerita at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.
Kamm studied at Barnard College, receiving her B.A. in 1969. She completed her doctorate in 1980 at the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
She was on the faculty of New York University during the 1980s to 1990s and received a professorship at Harvard in 2003.
Kamm's early work was concerned with the moral justification of abortion under the assumption of fetal personhood. She is also specifically associated with the trolley problem. Her most recent book, , addresses profound issues about death, the meaning of life, physician-assisted suicide, and so forth.
Kamm worked as an ethics consultant for the World Health Organization.
She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in Garrison, New York.
She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in Garrison, New York.
She held ACLS, AAUW, and Guggenheim fellowships, and has been a Fellow of the Program in Ethics and the Professions at the Kennedy School, the Center for Human Values at Princeton, and the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford.
She is a member of the editorial boards of Philosophy & Public Affairs, Legal Theory, Bioethics, and Utilitas.
In August 2007, Kamm delivered the annual Oslo Lecture in Moral Philosophy.
In 2008, she delivered the Uehiro Lectures at Oxford University in England.
In 2011, Kamm was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as an ethics consultant. In 2013, she delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kamm teaches the Gamma Cohort of the 2017 Harvard Kennedy School MPP program.
