Roger Crisp

Roger Crisp teaches at Oxford University. He writes: "I was born in 1961. I read for a Classics degree at St Anne's College, Oxford, and then went on to graduate work in philosophy there under the supervision of John Ackrill, Jonathan Glover, Alan Ryan, James Griffin, Michael Lockwood, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and David Wiggins. I am now Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Anne's, a post I've held since 1991. I've edited a few collections, and translated Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotelian ethics is something I'm quite interested in). I published a book on Mill and Utilitarianism (1997), and will shortly be a publishing a short work on ethics called Reasons and the Good (2006). (The cover should be a picture by van Dyck, if I can persuade the Queen to let me use it.) Reasons and the Good defends, among other things, the idea that, yes, we really do have certain reasons for action (despite what certain Humeans and Kantians might claim), and that we can even know about some of them by intuition. But knowledge-claims in this area are seriously limited by the high degree of disagreement found in ethics. About most ethical issues, then, we should suspend judgment — but that doesn't stop us from sharing the different ways we see things with one another. Indeed if we don't do that then there's no hope of any progress in ethics. The book also defends hedonism, and something like what Sidgwick called 'the dualism of practical reason' (the view that our reasons have two sources, one in our self-interest, and another which can be explained in terms of impartiality). It also argues for the idea that justice requires us to give special priority to those whose well-being falls below a certain threshold. In addition to normative ethical theory, I have written a bit about the nature of ethics ('meta-ethics') and quite a lot about 'practical' ethics, including euthanasia, non-human animals and the environment, advertising and business ethics generally, AIDS and informed consent, and the allocation of health care resources. I'm the philosophy delegate for Oxford University Press, which has given me an overview, if not an especially deep one, of much that's going on in analytic philosophy at present. My email address is roger.crisp @ st-annes.ox.ac.uk (without the spaces)."