George Sher

Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy
Rice University
6100 South Main Street, - MS 14
Houston, Texas 77005-1892
(713) 348-2723
gsher@rice.edu

    My research interests lie in moral psychology, in political philosophy, and, lately, in some of the connections between them.  My most recent book, Who Knew?  Responsibility Without Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2009) is an attempt to understand how agents can be responsible for acts of whose wrongness or foolishness they are unaware.  In that book, I develop some themes that I introduced in my earlier book In Praise of Blame (Oxford, 2006) - - most notably, the idea that blame and responsibility are less closely linked to control than many have imagined.  Within  political philosophy, I remain interested in the problems about liberalism and perfectionism that I discussed in Beyond Neutrality:  Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge, 1997).  Most recently, I've been thinking about what my ideas about responsibility imply about luck egalitarianism--that is, the view that inequalities are only unjust when they arise through no fault or choice of the affected parties.

Education

B.A., Brandeis University, 1964
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1972 

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