David Boonin

David Boonin is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he has taught since 1998. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of David Gauthier, who kindly assisted him in his rejection of Gauthier’s own interpretation of Hobbes, work that led to Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Thereafter his interests have taken him in pursuit of particular arguments that provoke him, beginning with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist analogy, which led to A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge, 2003) and more recently Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019). His other books include The Problem of Punishment (Cambridge, 2008), Should Race Matter? (Cambridge, 2011), The Non-identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People (Oxford, 2014), Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford, 2019), and soon a book on sexual consent very shortly followed by a book on the ethics of artificial intelligence, telling us why we shouldn’t worry too much about the coming Robopocalypse. He seems positively crestfallen if a position he defends is acceptable to the majority of his colleagues in academic philosophy.

Jeff McMahan

Jeff McMahan is Sekyra and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professorial Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where they work him entirely too hard. He is a self-professed former Good Ol’ Boy from one of the more retrograde corners of the Deep South, who discovered vegetarianism and consequently was forced to relocate to England. Initially drawn to the work of Jonathan Glover (on whose work he co-edited Ethics and Humanity (Oxford, 2010)) because of Glover’s accessible and vital work on life and death, he went on to work with both Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit, on the way to becoming a leading contemporary authority on killing in all its forms. His The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford, 2002) contains absolutely definitive discussions of identity, death and the ethics of killing at the beginnings and endings of life. Killing in War (Oxford, 2009) is the most radical and important work on just war theory since Michael Walzer’s. He has so many further works under contract that he cannot remember them all, but they include access to Derek Parfit’s previously unpublished works and developments of his own views on population ethics from his doctoral dissertation, along with a third volume in the Killing series. Meanwhile he has published innumerable papers on normative issues, from nationalism to animal rights, all of which display his signature style, packed with ingenious examples and evincing a laser-like focus. Really, he didn’t have time to talk to me, but it’s not just Corpus Christi who can take advantage of his inability to say “no.”

Jacob Ross

Jacob Ross is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. If one had to capture his wide interests under one umbrella term, perhaps “normativity” would be closest. He has written about ethics, epistemology, practical reason and aesthetics, publishing in such diverse and venerable journals as Ethics, The Philosophical Review, Mind, Ratio, and the Journal of Philosophical Logic, as well as a number of anthologies. He is a bit of a philosophical “bomb-thrower,” defending novel positions that challenge orthodoxy with ingenious and convincing argumentation. In this (albeit not in all things) he resembles the great Derek Parfit, on whose work I asked that he expound, who advised him on his dissertation, and with whom he maintained a philosophical exchange until the latter’s death. In our interview, Professor Ross expounds on Parfit’s most influential arguments and positions and explains, among other things, in what way Parfit is superior to Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, why he himself is definitely not a Buddhist, and why Parfit might feel a little betrayed by some of his publications. 

J. David Velleman

J. David Velleman is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Bioethics at NYU and Miller Research Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His interests are numerous, but include predominantly moral psychology, philosophy of action and metaethics. His first book, Practical Reflection (Princeton, 1989) was a re-working of his dissertation, written at Princeton under the direction of David Lewis, while his most recent, On Being Me (Princeton, 2020) is an illustrated introduction to philosophy in the form of a meditation. Most of this interview, however, centers on perhaps the most influential article on love written in the past quarter-century, “Love as a Moral Emotion” (Ethics 109 [2], 1999), wherein Velleman rejected Harry Frankfurt’s claim that love and morality were at odds and argued that not only was this not so, but that love and Kantian respect are on the same sliding scale of modes of valuing another person. An entire industry has now grown up around issues surrounding love, and almost everyone who writes on it in the analytical school of philosophy feels the need to address his arguments. In this interview he reveals a surprising source of the underlying convictions that motivated his position. Velleman has also written extensively on personal identity (his papers are collected in Self to Self [Cambridge, 2006]) and has firm views about what students need to learn before they can do bioethics, and how philosophy should be written. With that in mind, he is a founding co-editor of Philosophers’ Imprint and is currently launching a philosophy magazine with David Johnson that is committed to the scandalous notion that substantive philosophy should be accessible to the general public.

Pamela Hieronymi

Pamela Hieronymi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written about forgiveness, blame, belief, reasons, agency, responsibility, free will and ethics. She has one book forthcoming (Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals, Princeton) on perhaps the most influential article of the second half of the twentieth century, and another one under revision (Minds That Matter) that brings together most of the threads in her work so far. She believes humans almost unavoidably do wrong, but that that doesn’t excuse them from blame for so doing. However, the good news is that blame on her conception is not a form of punishment—it is not to be confused with “guilt tripping.” She also defends a version of the moral contractualism of T.M. Scanlon (whose What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard, 1998) she is acknowledged within, and which she is responsible for featuring prominently in the sitcom The Good Place) whereby morality is a matter of rules that reasonable people would agree to be constrained by if others did likewise. This is a “minimal” view of morality which has been criticized as giving too weak a reason against torturing babies for fun, a charge Hieronymi rejects. When she is not taking on consensus on the big questions in normative philosophy, or giving TV producers crash courses in philosophy, she spends time with her cat, despite her view that dogs are more likely capable of morality. 

Elizabeth Barnes

Elizabeth Barnes is Professor of Philosophy in the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is author of The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2016) and editor of Current Controversies in Metaphysics (Routledge, 2016). As those titles might reveal, Professor Barnes is interested both in the traditional, core analytic tradition of metaphysics and in social theory, and is particularly interested in areas of intersection between them. In this interview, we focus exclusively on The Minority Body wherein she defends the concept of disability against the charge that it is empty while at the same time arguing that one should not think of impairment and disability as distinct notions. She opens herself up to criticism on both sides, asserting both that disability is a socially constructed notion and that there is something essentially physical about being disabled. She also asserts both that disability in itself is neutral (neither bad nor good) and that it can be bad for individuals. In her spare time, Professor Barnes is enjoying being a crone and the company of neurotic rescue dogs, and is admirably tolerant of her running-obsessed sister.

Ben Bradley

Ben Bradley is the Allan and Anita Sutton Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Besides articles too numerous to list, and chapters in such volumes as The Oxford Handbook of Virtue and The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism, Ben has written the books Well Being and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009) and Well-Being (Polity Press, 2015), and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012). As might be apparent, Ben is morbidly obsessed with death, although I doubt he would phrase it quite that way, and he seems remarkably cheerful, despite arguing that one’s death does indeed harm one. His other major interest, which overlaps, is in the nature of value, where he defends the old-fashioned and unpopular view of hedonism, that the only intrinsic good is pleasure and the only intrinsically bad thing is pain. Ben is an admitted bullet-biter: he is used to incredulous stares (most notably for his view that dead people and possibly even never-existing potential people, have a well-being level) and is unfazed by them. He will defend his commitment to simple theories to suspiciously arcane lengths. I suspect that Ben’s obsession with death and his fondness for baseball are related.

Robert Kane

Robert Kane is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Along with too many articles to mention, Bob is the author of a number of books, among them The Significance of Free Will (Oxford, 1998), A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005) and Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (Cambridge, 2010), and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002) and Free Will (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). As might be obvious, he has a particular interest in the philosophical debate over free will, to which he has contributed his own distinctive conception, which takes elements from both compatibilism and libertarianism. Regarding the latter, he made it his mission to avoid “panicky metaphysics” while staying true to the rash claim he made as a graduate student that he could make sense of libertarian intuitions in a scientific context. He attributes his committed pluralism to his childhood in Maynard, MA. Not one to shy away from challenges, having solved the puzzle of free will, he has turned more recently to reviving the ancient view of wisdom as uniting metaphysics and ethics. And all this because he read A.J. Ayer as a twelve-year-old but refused to be put off Philosophy as a career. However, it has to be said that he did not have a hand in the creation of Batman.

Susan Wolf

Susan Wolf is Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She first burst on the scene in the early eighties with a trio of truly seminal papers: "Asymmetrical Freedom," "The Importance of Free Will" and "Moral Saints." Since then she has published prolifically primarily in two areas: free will and responsibility, and moral and non-moral values, her papers on the latter of which have just been collected in The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning & Love (Oxford, 2015). A second volume of her papers on responsibility will follow soon, or her long-suffering editor will want to know why not. Professor Wolf is a big fan of crusty British Philosophers Peter Strawson and Bernard Williams and, what's worse, actually reads Henry James novels for pleasure. But she will allow that it may be possible to have a meaningful life even if you don't.

Eric Olson

Philosophy has brought Eric Olson from the deserts of Eastern Washington State to Cambridge, and thence to the home of Stainless Steel and The Full Monty, where he is Professor of Philosophy at Sheffield University. He is known for his rejection of the orthodox view of personal identity associated with everyone from John Locke to Derek Parfit and his stubborn insistence that we are animals, a view which he has defended in numerous articles and his two books, The Human Animal (1997) and What Are We? (2007, both Oxford University Press). He enjoys running and currently his thoughts are turning to the topic of death, although the two are unrelated.

David Shoemaker

David Shoemaker is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Murphy Institute of Tulane University. His areas of interest lie predominantly in the topics of personal identity and moral responsibility. He runs the biennial New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility, out of which come the Oxford University Press series Studies in Agency and Responsibility, for which he is the editor. He has written a bewildering profusion of articles for leading journals, and three books, the most recent of which is Responsibility from the Margins, hot off the presses from Oxford. No library is complete without a copy. He is the co-founder and co-editor of PEA Soup. David will fight anybody who questions the notion that Peter Strawson's article "Freedom and Resentment" is the greatest article in the last 60 or so years. Don't get him started on psychopaths.

Marya Schechtman

Marya Schechtman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is also a member of the Laboratory of Integrated Neuroscience. She got her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard, and her dissertation on personal identity became her first book, The Constitution of Selves (Cornell, 1996). In this work she argues that the dominant view of personal identity most famously defended by Sidney Shoemaker and modified by Derek Parfit, which takes the work of John Locke as inspiration, misses out a vital element of Locke's view. She defends what she calls The Narrative Self-Constitution View. This view became influential, and therefore a target for criticism, from the burgeoning animalist movement in the philosophy of personal identity on one side, and from what the philosopher Galen Strawson calls "episodics" on the other. In her new book, Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of Life (Oxford, 2014), she responds to the critiques and advances the Person Life View, which takes persons as essentially situated within cultures.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is many things and does many more. Besides being Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, he is also a faculty member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences and a Partner Investigator at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, and Research Scientist with The Mind Research Network in New Mexico. He has been invited to prestigious institutions the world over, from Taiwan to Australia, from Oxford to Harvard and Princeton. His interests range from the straightforwardly analytic to the full-on empirical. Areas he has worked in straddle the normative, legal and scientific and most recently include neuroprediction of crime, neural detection of consciousness in brain-damaged patients, psychopaths, free will and moral responsibility, and the neural basis of moral judgments. He has also taken the atheist side in debates with Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and has strong opinions about online teaching.

Elizabeth Anderson

Elizabeth Anderson, besides being a 2013 Guggenheim fellow and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, recently transitioned from being the John Rawls Collegiate Professor to the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies. She has written on a wide range of normative issues, including surrogacy, dependent care, animal rights, affirmative action and the theories of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. In her 1999 article, "What is the Point of Equality?," she coined the term "luck egalitarianism" for the then dominant view of egalitarianism in political philosophy, even though her intent was just to have a name for the obituary. Her article "If God is Dead, is Everything Permitted?" was included in Christopher Hitchens' anthology The Portable Atheist. Her most recent book, The Imperative of Integration was winner of the 2011 Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association. She is currently writing a history of egalitarian movements.

Allen Buchanan

Allen Buchanan wears many hats. In the Fall, he is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. In the Spring, he jets off to Tucson, where he is a Research Professor at the Freedom Center at the University of Arizona. Finally, in May and June he is to be found in London, at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, where he is Professor of Philosophy of International Law. His teaching and research focus on political philosophy, philosophy of international law, social/moral epistemology, and bioethics. His most recent books include: Justice and Health Care: Selected Essays, Human Rights, Legitimacy, and the Use of Force: Selected Essays, Beyond Humanity? The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement. We interviewed him on the day he moved into a new flat for his time in London.