I am the Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford. Before that I was a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in the United States. I’ve held visiting positions at the University of California, Los Angeles philosophy department and at the University of Chicago Law School. Before my life as a philosopher, I worked as a law associate on a (pro bono) death penalty case and several (non pro bono) product liability (water valves in nuclear power plant cooling) and medical malpractice cases. I have a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an A.B. from Dartmouth College. I am a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
My current academic interests concern the nature of normativity, the structure of values and reasons, practical reason, agency, rationality, population ethics, love, commitment, decision-making, and the self. Most recently I am exploring ways in which the AI alignment problem might be addressed by designing technology to recognize ‘hard choices’. My research on choice and decision-making has been profiled by print, television and radio media outlets in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Taiwan, Australia, Italy, Israel, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, and Austria, and I have given lectures or been a consultant to a variety of industries and institutions including video gaming, pharmaceuticals, head-hunting, banking and finance, the U.S. Navy, the CIA, National Geographic, Google, and the World Bank. My TED talk on decision-making has around 9 million views. For more detail, see Outreach.
My philosophical interests are very broad, but my current research interests can be summarized by two cartoons. For more detail, see Selected Publications link at the top of this page.