About Philippe
Foubert

I came to scholarship late and by an unusual road. My undergraduate degree, in European history at Seattle University, was completed under the GI Bill, summa cum laude in the Honors Program, and I was elected to Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit academic honour society, on the nomination of the Honors Program and the History Department. That degree remains foundational to how I read anything: history first, then argument.

Graduate work at the University of Notre Dame followed, a master’s and then a doctorate in theological ethics, with specialisations in philosophical ethics, systematic theology and New Testament, and research languages in Greek, Latin, French and German. My dissertation examined historical consciousness in American Catholic moral theology after the Second Vatican Council: what happens to a tradition of natural law reasoning when it accepts that human understanding is itself historically conditioned. The question has never left me. It is the same question I now ask of Australian law and Australian memory.

John Fletcher, who founded the bioethics programme at the National Institutes of Health, trained me as a clinical ethics fellow and then hired me as the first professional appointment to his new Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. We founded an ethics consultation service there and built an interdisciplinary programme around it. The University of Nebraska Medical Center recruited me to do the same in Omaha, where I wrote the proposal, moved it through the institutional politics, and staffed an eighteen-member service across six disciplines.

What that service did, on call at any hour, was sit with the decisions nobody wanted to make alone. Whether to withdraw ventilation. Whether a consent obtained in a corridor was consent at all. Whether the treatment a family was demanding had become the thing harming the patient. Whether a life-sustaining measure was sustaining a life or extending a death. Those conversations happened at bedsides, with the people whose lives turned on them, and they are not the sort of thing anyone should list as an accomplishment. I mention them only because they are where I learned what the rest of this work rests on: that the person with the least power in a room usually understands the situation best, and that an ethics which cannot be acted on is decoration.

Australia became home in 1996, through my appointment as Hospital Ethicist at the Mater Misericordiae Hospitals in Brisbane. The work there ran from the bedside to the boardroom: a twenty-four-hour confidential consultation service, clinical ward rounds, professional education for more than six hundred clinicians, ethics support to the Governing Board’s Ethics Advisory Council, policy development, and research ethics review across four committees. Afterwards I established The Ethics Consultation Group, providing ethics programmes to hospitals across Queensland.

What such a career teaches is not a set of principles but a habit of attention. Most apparent moral disagreements turn out on examination to be failures of communication, an unspoken prognosis, or a question nobody has been willing to ask aloud. What remains after that is the genuine problem. And ethics which lives only at the bedside protects nobody systematically: the durable work has to reach governance, policy and structure.

That conviction is what carried me from hospitals to the questions I write about now. Living on Quandamooka Country changed which institutions I examined. With Linda Harnett I worked with Reconciliation Queensland delivering public education programmes, and we campaigned for the Voice to Parliament. The referendum’s defeat did not settle the question; it clarified how much of the work is historical literacy, and how little of the record most Australians have ever been shown.

My reading of these questions is anchored in the constitutional reform thinking of Professors Megan Davis and Marcia Langton, and in a long-standing interest in the philosophy of history. Justice, on this account, endures primarily as structure. Truth-telling is necessary but insufficient until it is codified constitutionally.

Alongside the writing I build and operate websites for community projects, and photograph and record the people who speak at them. When that work concerns First Nations communities, I build the platform, the audience and the record. What gets said belongs to the speaker.