I’ve been a faculty member at the Hebrew U – on a joint appointment in law and philosophy – since 2003.

I work primarily in moral, legal, and political philosophy.

In moral philosophy, much of my work has been in metaethics, where I defend a fairly robust objectivist, realist view about morality and about normativity more generally. According to this view, there are moral (and other normative) facts that do not constitutively depend on us, that we discover rather than create or construct, and that are irreducible to run-of-the-mill natural facts. 

In the philosophy of law I sometimes voice skepticism about the more conceptual parts of the discussion about the nature of law, and I take part mostly in normative discussions about law, such as questions about the right status of statistical evidence, or about the role of luck in morality and law. 

In political philosophy I develop and defend a comprehensive liberal view – one that does not aspire to the kind of neutrality Rawls’s “Political Liberalism” aspires to. I criticize such Rawlsian views, and I try to accommodate, within liberalism, insights more commonly found among critics of liberalism.

In the faculty of law I usually teach jurisprudence (usually, the part that is really just intro to moral and political philosophy), and sometimes a workshop or seminar at the intersection of law and philosophy. In the philosophy department I usually teach the first-year course “Central Problems in Philosophy”, and various seminars (mostly in metaethics and in political philosophy).

Education

B.A. in Law and Philosophy, Tel Aviv University
PhD in philosophy, NYU

Representative publications

1. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford University Press, 2011).
2. "Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won't Come from What is Constitutive of Agency?, Philosophical Review 115 (2006), 169-198.
3. "Reason-Giving and the Law", Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law 1 (2011), 1-38.
4. "Moral Luck and the Law", Philosophy Compass 5 (2010), 42-54.
5. "Being Responsible, Taking Responsibility, and Penumbral Agency”, in Ulrike Heuer and Gerald Lang (eds.) Luck, Value and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams (Oxford University Press, 2012).