Charles Foster

Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'

Education He was educated at Shrewsbury School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read Veterinary Medicine and Law. He holds a PhD in medical law and ethics from the University of Cambridge. He is a qualified veterinary surgeon. He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple.

Career After Cambridge he worked on the comparative anatomy of the Himalayan Hispid hare and chemotaxis in leeches, worked in Saudi Arabia studying the immobilisation of Goitred and Mountain gazelles, did pupillage at the English Bar, and was a research fellow at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was a research assistant to Aharon Barak, Justice (and later President) of the Supreme Court of Israel. He practises at the Bar in London, primarily in medical law, and has been involved in some of the most significant cases of recent years. He was called to the Bar of the Republic of Ireland in 1996. He teaches Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Oxford and was a Visiting Fellow of Green College, Oxford. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He left the college in 2022, when he was elected a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

Recent expeditions have included the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, studying water metabolism in mules; ecological surveys in the Quirimbas Archipelago, northern Mozambique, and a successful ski expedition to the North Pole. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Linnean Society.

In the fields of law and philosophy he is probably best known for his criticisms of the hegemony of autonomy in medical ethics (in 'Choosing Life, Choosing Death' (2009)), and for his contention that the 'Four Principles' approach of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress is redundant, and should be replaced by an analysis based on a broadly Aristotelian account of human dignity ('Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law' (2011)).

Many of his writings on religion have been attacked as heretical by conservative Christians, particularly in the US.

As part of his philosophical investigations relating to authenticity and identity, he has tried living as a badger, an otter, an urban fox, a red deer and a swift, and he has written about this in his book Being a Beast in 2016. For living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird, he won an Ig Nobel prize in Biology.