Jan Deckers

In a book chapter on 'Fairness in Newcastle: Theory and Practice’, Deckers engages with a report of the Newcastle Fairness Commission, published in 2012, which set out to define some principles of fairness to improve decision-making and guide the work of Newcastle City Council and other organisations in the city. He has also published on ethics related to artificial intelligence.

At the 7th World Congress of Bioethics, Sydney, November 2004, Deckers received the Honourable Mention 2004 Mark S. Ehrenreich Prize for Healthcare Ethics Research of the International Association of Bioethics and the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics at the University of Southern California. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. In 2014 Deckers was awarded a 'Society and Ethics' grant from the Wellcome Trust to convene a conference on 'An ethical discussion of in-vitro meat and the production of flesh from animals with enhanced properties.'

In his article ‘Are scientists right and non-scientists wrong? Reflections on discussions of GM’ Deckers analyses the views of scientists and non-scientists on genetic engineering. In a comprehensive overview of the literature between 1975 and 2008, the article was identified as a key paper in the debate on the ethics of GM crops. More recent work reflects on the meaning and the moral significance or otherwise of the (un)natural, where Deckers argues, inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s teleological understanding of natural entities, that the concept of the unnatural carries both meaning and moral significance in discussions of genetic engineering. At the same time, his (ontological) understanding of the world is critical of Whitehead's thought by rejecting the view that the universe as a whole is a teleological entity. Deckers also developed a contextualised case in human genetics as a teaching resource for Advance Higher Education.

Jan Deckers (born 1970) works in bioethics at Newcastle University. His work revolves mainly around three topics: animal ethics, reproductive ethics and embryo research, and genetics.