Education

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Yale, 2011

About

Tina Rulli received her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 2011. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Clinical Center Bioethics Department at the National Institutes of Health from 2011-2013. She joined the UC Davis Department of Philosophy in 2014. 

Research Focus

Tina Rulli’s research is in normative ethics, applied ethics, and bioethics. On the applied side, she is interested in applications of the duty to rescue and the ethics of procreation and adoption. On the normative, theoretical side, her work spans across population ethics, the demands of morality, and the possibility for moral options.

Select Publications

• Rulli, T. “The Moral Status of Possible Persons,” The Oxford Handbook for Normative Ethics, eds. David Copp, Connie Rosati, Tina Rulli, accepted/forthcoming 2025.
• Rulli, T. “Embryo Gene Editing is Not Morally Better than Selection Even If Person-Affecting,” The American Journal of Bioethics, Open Peer Commentary. Vol 24, No 8: 20-22.
• Rulli, T. “Effective Altruists Need Not Be Pronatalist Longtermists,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol 38, No. 1, 2024.
• Rulli, T.* & Campbell, S. “Can ‘My Body, My Choice’ Anti-vaxxers be Pro-Life?” Bioethics Vol 36 (2022): 708-714.
• Rulli, T. “Conditional Obligations,” Social Theory and Practice Vol 46, No. 2 (April 2020): 365-390.
• Rulli, T. “Reproductive CRISPR Does Not Cure Disease,” Bioethics (September 2019 Early View).
• Rulli, T. The ethics of procreation and adoption, Philosophy Compass 11/6 (2016): 305-315.
• Rulli, T. (2014) Preferring a genetically-related child, Journal of Moral Philosophy, online November 2014.
• Rulli, T., Emanuel, E., & Wendler, D. (2012) The moral duty to buy health insurance, Journal of the American Medical Association 308/2: 137-138.

Teaching

Tina Rulli teaches courses in normative ethics and bioethics, including a large Introduction to Bioethics lecture course (PHI 015) and a smaller, discussion-focused upper division undergraduate course in Bioethics (PHI 121). In addition, she teaches Philosophy of Race (PHI 122) and graduate level ethics (PHI 214).

Awards

Hellman Fellow, Hellman Fellows Fund, 2017-2018