| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | 21st century Philosophy |
| School Tradition: | Analytic philosophy |
| Institutions: | Johns Hopkins University |
| Main Interests: | Moral theory, Bioethics |
| Education: | Princeton University (BA) Harvard University (PhD) |
| Influences: | Kant |
| Awards: | Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellowship |
Hilary Bok (born 1959) is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Bioethics and Moral & Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University. Bok received a B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1981 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991.
Her parents are the well-known academics Derek Bok and Sissela Bok and her maternal grandparents were the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal, both Nobel laureates. Her paternal grandparents were distinguished Pennsylvania jurist Curtis Bok and Margaret Plummer Bok.[1]
She served as associate professor of philosophy at Pomona College from 1997 to 2000. Bok was also a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values from 1994 to 1995. Her areas of specialization are bioethics, moral philosophy, free will, and the works of Immanuel Kant. She is a faculty member of the Berman Institute of Bioethics. Bok is the author of Freedom and Responsibility (1998), a Kantian critique of libertarian theories of free will. More recently, she has written extensively about stem cell research, most notably in The Lancet.
Bok blogged until 2009 under the pseudonym "hilzoy" at the well-known blogs Obsidian Wings[2] and "Political Animal"[3] (the blog of The Washington Monthly magazine).[4]