ABOUT

Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, I studied philosophy at Monash University (1972-1979), and then briefly left academia to become an English and Politics teacher at Melbourne Boys High School (1980-1981). The award of a Commonwealth Overseas Scholarship enabled me to return and attend Oxford University (1981-1984) where I worked closely with R. M. Hare, Jennifer Hornsby, and Simon Blackburn. Blackburn supervised my BPhil and DPhil theses, so on Philosophy Tree my academic forebears trace back, via Blackburn, to Casimir Lewy, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittengstein, Bertrand Russell, and the psychologist and panpsychist James Ward.

After a period as Stipendiary Lecturer at Wadham College during my final year at Oxford, I held teaching positions at Monash University (1984-5), Princeton University (1985-9), and Monash University again (1989-94), before moving to a full-time research position in philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (1995-2004). (The latter move occasioned my then-colleague at Monash, Richard Holton, to write some amusing doggerel.) Appointed initially to a Senior Fellowship in RSSS, I became Professor of Philosophy in 1997, and Head of the Division of Philosophy and Law at RSSS in 1998. While at ANU I was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1997, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2000. In 2003, I was awarded the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and humanities in the study of philosophy.

In 2004, I returned to teach at Princeton, where I was named McCosh Professor of Philosophy in 2009. You can find out a little about McCosh's own philosophical work by reading David Sanford's very funny introduction when I gave the Claire Miller Lecture at Chapel Hill in 2011. (Whatever you make of McCosh's own philosophical achievements, as Princeton’s eleventh president (1868-88) he was an admirably vocal critic of slavery and the Confederacy, so much so that he clashed with white southern students attending the college after the Civil War.) While at Princeton, I served as Chair of the Philosophy Department 2012-18; I was a member of the Executive Committee of the University Center for Human Values 2004-2025, serving as Acting Director of UCHV 2020-21; a member of the Committee for Film Studies 2014-2024, serving as Chair 2019-2021; and Associated Faculty Member in the Department of Politics 2009-2025.

In 2010 I was awarded a Forschungspreis by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2012 I was awarded Princeton's Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award. In 2013 I was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 I received the Distinguished Alumni Award for the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and for the next five years served as Distinguished Visiting Focus Professor in Monash Philosophy's Focus Program on Belief, Value, and Mind. In 2023 I received Princeton's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. At the end of June 2025, I retired from Princeton and became McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. My wife and I relocated to a coastal town an hour and a half southwest of Melbourne. Coincidentally, that coastal town is named after Ocean Grove, New Jersey, one of the closest beaches to Princeton.

My current research focuses on topics in ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of action, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and aesthetics. My John Locke Lectures, given at Oxford in 2017, spanned all these topics, and those lectures will appear in due course under the title A Standard of Judgement. In addition to editing several books, I am the author of The Moral Problem (1994) (which won the American Philosophical Association Book Prize), and Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics (2004) (which was the subject of an off-beat review by Constantine Sandis). In addition, I am a co-author of Mind, Morality and Explanation: Selected Collaborations (2004), a collection of papers written in various combinations by me and my two long-time colleagues, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit (our collaborative work inspired David Estlund to make a morphing gif of the three of us).

At Princeton, I was known for singing and playing guitar at events on campus, something I occasionally did at philosophy conferences as well. A video of me playing my wife Monica's favorite song at Princeton's Reunions long weekend in 2015 can be found here. This musical Reunions' event was organized by my colleague Robert George, with whom I co-taught and played guitar for many years. Here is a video of us playing together at that same event. Videos of me accompanying Nomy Arpaly at CHill Meta in 2016 and MadMeta in 2023, the latter along with Jamie Dreier, can be seen here and here, and a video of Kim Girman and me celebrating Chuck Beitz's achievements as Director of UCHV in 2016 can be seen here. Susan Brison and I also sang and played together whenever we could. Here is a practice video we made before we performed at a UCHV book talk by Jeffrey Edward Green, and here is a song we sang for Peter Singer at his Princeton farewell dinner. When I turned seventy and retired from Princeton, Robert George organized colleagues to perform at Michaelfest!; Andrew Lovett composed “Meditation”, a gorgeous song based on my name and the English musical cryptogram; and members of the Philosophy Department farwelled me with Sarah McGrath's rewrite of “So Long, It's Been Good to Know Ya”.

For more information, see the entry in Companion to Philosophy in Australia (2010), or the interview in The Antipodean Philosopher Volume 2: Interviews with Australian and New Zealand Philosophers (2012). My Philosophy Alumni Lecture, given at Princeton via Zoom in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, can be seen here. A larger format version of my homepage photo can be found by clicking here.