Xavier Symons

Xavier Symons is Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at ACU. Xavier previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and prior to this was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Plunkett Centre and a Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He has lectured in bioethics at the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law and at the University of Notre Dame Australia Medical School.

Xavier's research interests span a broad range of themes in bioethics. He wrote a doctoral thesis on contemporary theories of distributive justice and the ethics of healthcare resource allocation. He has written extensively about the ethics of end of life care and voluntary assisted dying. More recently he has explored the ethics of conscientious objection in healthcare. His first book, Why Conscience Matters: A Defence of Conscientious Objection in Healthcare, was published in July 2022 by Routledge.

Xavier has contributed extensively to both Australian and international media outlets and his work has been featured in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, ABC Religion and Ethics, The Guardian, and Public Discourse. He holds degrees from the University of Sydney, the University of Oxford, and the Australian Catholic University.