Jeff McMahan

Jeff McMahan is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He studied English literature as an undergraduate at Sewanee, switched to philosophy at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and completed his graduate work at Cambridge, where he was a fellow of St. John’s College. He is the author of The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford, 2002), and Killing in War (Oxford, 2009). Although his writing on issues in ethics and politics tends to be quite theoretical, he is not an adherent of any particular theory of normative ethics. He works instead from the particular to the general, in the hope that achieving a clearer understanding of particular moral issues will enable us eventually to develop a moral theory that is more adequate to the full complexity of moral reality than any of the theories currently on offer. 

Photograph by Boris Yakubchik.