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Welcome to My Home
Page
I am an academic philosopher working as
an associate professor at the
Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University. I've been
here since 2002, after teaching for two years in the
Department of Philosophy
at Yale University. I received my
PhD from Princeton University,
having also studied at the
University of Bielefeld (where I got a Master's Degree in
Mathematics),
the University of
Pittsburgh, and the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (where I wrote my master's thesis
in mathematics under the supervision of Robert Aumann). My thesis
advisors in Princeton were Richard Jeffrey (who died in 2002, see
here
for a memorial page) and Paul Benacerraf (see
here for a picture of Paul and
me at his retirement in 2007). My dissertation was concerned
with some questions about group decision making, some of it best
characterized as decision theory (including some mathematical
parts), and some of it best characterized as political philosophy. I
have since worked mostly on political philosophy, first on a range
of questions including equality and responsibility, equality of
opportunity, racial profiling, majoritarian voting, etc., but for a
few years I have focused primarily on questions of global justice,
including topics such as obligations towards the poor, how the
global order might harm the poor, fairness in trade, human rights,
immigration, and the justifiability of the state. I am currently
writing a book that brings together my work on these issues,
tentatively called The Grounds of Justice: An Inquiry about the State in Global Perspective
(see
here for the current version of the book proposal). My goal there is to offer a foundational theory of global justice that takes an approach "in between" the classical dichotomy according to which principles of justice either apply only within the state, or else apply globally, either because they apply to the global political and economic order, or else because they apply to all human beings in virtue of being human.
Instead, I develop a view I call pluralist internationalism,
according to which there are different grounds of justice that
individuals may or may not share, such that those who share such a
ground are people to whom the distribution of certain goods must be
justifiable. Principles of justice then are those principles that
fulfill that role, and they will vary with the specific grounds.
While this is an unorthodox approach to thinking about justice, what
is most distinctly novel about all this is that among these grounds
of justice as I see them is shared ownership of the earth. That is,
I am trying to revitalize a standpoint that was central to 17th
century political philosophy but has since never received as much
attention. Topics that one can fruitfully address through that
approach include issues of immigration, the foundations of human
rights, as well as obligations to future generations in the context
of climate change. At the Kennedy School, I am faculty associate of
the Center for Ethics
as well as the Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy, and I am also directing the
McCloy Fellowship
Program that the Kennedy School runs jointly with the
German
National Academic Foundation. I am also a faculty associate at
the Weatherhead Center for
International Affairs. In addition to my work in political
philosophy, I have serious research interest in
post-Kantian, and mostly 19th century, German philosophy, in
particular Nietzsche.
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