David Enoch (philosopher)

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David Enoch
Education Tel Aviv University (B.A., LL.B.)
New York University (PhD)
Notable workTaking Morality Seriously (2011)
Era Contemporary philosophy
School Analytic philosophy
Thesis A Defense of Robust Meta-Normative Realism (2003)
Doctoral advisors Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel, Hartry Field [1]
Main interests
Moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of law
Website Personal website

David Enoch is an ethicist and philosopher of law with research interests in moral, political and legal philosophy within the analytic tradition. He is the co-director of the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy and has been the Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2005. [1] [2] He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and Bachelor of Laws degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He then completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University in 2003. [1]

Contents

Enoch is a member of the Israeli Law Professors' Forum for Democracy, established in 2023 to analyze and address of the various reforms proposed by Israel’s 37th Government to change Israel’s democratic regime. [3]

Philosophy

In metaethics, Enoch defends [4] “Robust Realism”, the view according to which there are objective, universal, non-natural moral truths, truths that when successful in our moral inquiries we discover rather than create, that don’t constitutively depend on us and our dispositions.

In political philosophy, Enoch criticizes Rawlsian versions of liberalism, [5] and is developing a non-Rawlsian liberalism, that is sensitive to the concerns of the real world, [6] and that attempts to incorporate the insights of liberalism’s critics. [7]

In legal philosophy, Enoch criticizes common ways of doing general jurisprudence, [8] and works on specific normative questions concerning the law, for instance, when it comes to moral and legal luck, [9] or to the status of statistical evidence. [10] [11]

In ethics, Enoch defends moral deference, [12] and the views that consent should be understood contrastively, [13] that a distinction within the value of autonomy helps to clarify the status of hypothetical consent, [14] and that the intending-foreseeing distinction is suspicious – especially when applied to state action. [15]

Bibliography

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "David Enoch CV" (PDF). The Hebrew University Philosophy Department and Faculty of Law. Hebrew University of Jerusalem. August 2018. Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 September 2021.
  2. "Prof David Enoch". Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Archived from the original on 13 February 2017.
  3. https://www.lawprofsforum.org/en
  4. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  5. Against Public Reason”, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 1 (2015), 112-142
  6. Against Utopianism: Noncompliance and Multiple Agents”, Philosopher’s Imprint 18 (2018)
  7. “False Consciousness for Liberals, Part I: Consent, Autonomy, and Adaptive Preferences”, The Philosophical Review 129 (2020), 159-210
  8. “Is General Jurisprudence Interesting?” in Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence (edited by David Plunkett, Scott Shapiro, and Kevin Toh) (Oxford University Press, 2019).
  9. “Luck between Morality, Law and Justice”, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9 (2008), 23-59; “Moral Luck and the Law”, Philosophy Compass 5 (2010), 42-54.
  10. “Statistical Evidence, Sensitivity, and the Legal Value of Knowledge” (with Levi Spectre and Talia Fisher), Philosophy and Public Affairs 40 (2012), 197-224
  11. David Enoch, “Sense and Sensitivity” (with Talia Fisher), Stanford Law Review 67 (2015), 557-611
  12. “A Defense of Moral Deference”, The Journal of Philosophy 111 (2014), 1-30.
  13. “Contrastive Consent and Third-Party Coercion”. Forthcoming in Philosopher’s Imprint.
  14. “Hypothetical Consent and the Value(s) of Autonomy”, Ethics 128 (2017), 6-36.
  15. “Intending, Foreseeing, and the State”, Legal Theory 13 (2007), 69-99.
  16. Reviews of Taking Morality Seriously: