Having completed my DPhil at Corpus in 1988, I taught philosophy at the University of Sheffield, the University of Reading and King’s College London interspersed with visiting appointments at All Souls College, Oxford, Yale University, London University, Sydney University, New York University and the University of Lublin. During the academic year 2024-5, I was a fellow of the WissenschaftsKolleg zu Berlin before returning to Oxford to take up the Sekyra and White’s Professorship of Moral Philosophy in 2025.
Books
| Bound by Convention. Oxford University Press, 2022. |
| Normativity and Control. Oxford University Press, 2017. |
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Shaping the Normative Landscape. Oxford University Press, 2012.
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| Reason Without Freedom. Routledge, 2000. |
Articles and Chapters
| 'Rules and rulers: Demanding, commanding and assuming responsibility', Political Philosophy, 1(2), pp. 463–487, 2024. |
| 'Wrong by convention', Ethics, 127(3), pp. 553–575, 2017. |
| 'Disenchantment' in L. Antony (ed) Philosophers Without Gods (OUP), 2007. |
| 'A simple theory of promising', Philosophical Review, 115(1), pp. 51–77, 2006. |
My starting point in philosophy was metaphysics, followed by epistemology, but in the last 25 years my attention has turned towards moral, political and legal philosophy. Inspired by the work of writers such as Hobbes and Hume, I’m interested in the extent to which our morality is determined by social convention. Philosophers tend to think that the authority of social rules is to be explained in terms of pre-conventional moral principles. I see social convention as playing a more fundamental role in our lives. Things like private property, promises and commands are social creations which enable individuals to alter the rights and obligations of those around them whilst social rules about how you should behave in public towards strangers or how you should treat your family members settle our rights and obligations in a way no individual controls.
