Henry S. Richardson

Last updated
Henry S. Richardson
Born
Henry Shattuck Richardson

1955 (age 6869)
United States
Education Harvard University (BA, JD, MPP)
SpouseMary E. Challinor
Institutions Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University
Thesis Rational deliberation of ends  (1986)
Doctoral advisor John Rawls
Main interests
Practical reasoning, moral reasoning and bioethics

Henry Shattuck Richardson (born 1955) [1] [2] is an American philosopher, author, and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, where he is also a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. [3] [4]

Contents

Early life and education

Richardson is the son of Anne Richardson, who was once the chair of Reading is Fundamental, and the politician and lawyer Elliot Richardson, who served as United States Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, and Secretary of Commerce. [5]

Richardson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977. He then received a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government (supervised by Martha Nussbaum), both in 1981. In 1986, Richardson received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University under the supervision of John Rawls; his thesis was titled Rational deliberation of ends. [3] [1]

Academic career

Richardson's main work has centred on practical reasoning. His first book, Practical Reasoning about Final Ends, [6] focused on individual reasoning, whilst his second book, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy, [7] which won the Herbert A. Simon Best Book Award in Public Administration, [8] and the David Easton Award in the Foundations of Political Theory, [9] dealt with collective reasoning.

In addition to working on practical reasoning and moral and political philosophy, Richardson has written on bioethics. He has twice been a visiting scholar at the Department of Bioethics at the (U.S.) National Institutes of Health.

From 2008 to 2018, he was the Editor of the academic journal Ethics . [10] From 2010 to 2013, through his work as a member of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), he has acted as an advisor to the Director General of UNESCO on ethical issues relating to science and technology. [3] [4]

In September 2014 Richardson began a two-year tenure as president of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA). [11] He was succeeded by the economist Ravi Kanbur. [12] From 2014 to 2017, he served as one of two "coordinating lead authors" on the orienting normative chapter of the three-volume report of the International Panel of Social Progress, [13] Rethinking Society for the 21st Century. [14]

In 2019, Richardson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. [15]

Works

Books

Journal articles

Related Research Articles

Applied ethics is the practical aspect of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, bioethics is concerned with identifying the best approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes the duties of whistleblowers to the public and to their employers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Casuistry</span> Reasoning by extrapolation

In ethics, casuistry is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending abstract rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances. This method occurs in applied ethics and jurisprudence. The term is also used pejoratively to criticise the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions. It has been defined as follows:

Study of cases of conscience and a method of solving conflicts of obligations by applying general principles of ethics, religion, and moral theology to particular and concrete cases of human conduct. This frequently demands an extensive knowledge of natural law and equity, civil law, ecclesiastical precepts, and an exceptional skill in interpreting these various norms of conduct....

Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morality</span> Differentiation between right and wrong

Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness", "appropriateness" or "rightness".

David Gauthier was a Canadian philosopher best known for his neo-Hobbesian or contractarian theory of morality, as developed in his 1986 book Morals by Agreement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Sidgwick</span> English philosopher and economist (1838–1900)

Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist and is best known in philosophy for his utilitarian treatise The Methods of Ethics. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence. He was the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1883 until his death. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research and a member of the Metaphysical Society and promoted the higher education of women. In 1875, with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, he co-founded Newnham College, a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It was the second Cambridge college to admit women, after Girton College. In 1856, Sidgwick joined the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society.

Moral skepticism is a class of meta-ethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal claim that moral knowledge is impossible. Moral skepticism is particularly opposed to moral realism: the view that there are knowable and objective moral truths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F. H. Bradley</span> British philosopher (1846–1924)

Francis Herbert Bradley was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality (1893).

Phronesis is a type of wisdom or intelligence concerned with practical action. It implies both good judgment and excellence of character and habits, and was a common topic of discussion in ancient Greek philosophy. Classical works about this topic are still influential today. In Aristotelian ethics, the concept was distinguished from other words for wisdom and intellectual virtues—such as episteme and sophia—because of its practical character. The traditional Latin translation is prudentia, which is the source of the English word "prudence".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Raz</span> Israeli philosopher (1939–2022)

Joseph Raz was an Israeli legal, moral and political philosopher. He was an advocate of legal positivism and is known for his conception of perfectionist liberalism. Raz spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy of law at Balliol College, Oxford, and was latterly a part-time professor of law at Columbia University Law School and a part-time professor at King's College London. He received the Tang Prize in Rule of Law in 2018.

Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have claimed that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Rachels</span> American philosopher and ethicist

James Webster Rachels was an American philosopher who specialized in ethics and animal rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Brighouse</span> British philosopher

Harry Brighouse is a British political philosopher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include moral philosophy and the relationship between education and liberalism. Brighouse is particulary famous for his book with philosopher and sociologist Adam Swift, Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, which is considered seminal work on the moral philosophy of the family.

The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory that holds that moral action centers on interpersonal relationships and care or benevolence as a virtue. EoC is one of a cluster of normative ethical theories that were developed by some feminists and environmentalists since the 1980s. While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize generalizable standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the importance of response to the individual. The distinction between the general and the individual is reflected in their different moral questions: "what is just?" versus "how to respond?" Carol Gilligan, who is considered the originator of the ethics of care, criticized the application of generalized standards as "morally problematic, since it breeds moral blindness or indifference".

Julia Elizabeth Annas is a British philosopher who has taught in the United States for the last quarter-century. She is Regents Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Arizona.

Principlism is an applied ethics approach to the examination of moral dilemmas centering the application of certain ethical principles. This approach to ethical decision-making has been prevalently adopted in various professional fields, largely because it sidesteps complex debates in moral philosophy at the theoretical level.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that examines right and wrong moral behavior, moral concepts and moral language. Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value, and thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pragmatic ethics</span> Theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics

Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Crary</span> American philosopher

Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Herman</span> American philosopher (born 1945)

Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Philosophy. A well-known interpreter of Kant's ethics, Herman works on moral philosophy, the history of ethics, and social and political philosophy. Among her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-1986) and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995).

References

  1. 1 2 Richardson, Henry Shattuck (1986). Rational deliberation of ends (Ph.D.). Harvard University.
  2. Berlin, Isaiah (2017). Affirming: Letters 1975-1997. New York: Random House. ISBN   9781473555396.
  3. 1 2 3 "Henry S Richardson". Georgetown University. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  4. 1 2 "Henry S. Richardson, J.D., M.P.P., Ph.D." Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  5. "Anne Richardson, 69, Patron of Literacy (obituary)". The New York Times. 29 July 1999. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  6. Richardson, Henry (1997). Practical reasoning about final ends. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9780521574426.
  7. Richardson, Henry (2002). Democratic autonomy: public reasoning about the ends of policy . New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780195150919.
  8. "Organized Section Awards - Public Administration Organized Section: Herbert A. Simon Book Award Recipients". American Political Science Association. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  9. "Book awards: David Easton Award". Library Thing. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  10. "Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy (Editorial Board)" . Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  11. "Election results for HDCA Executive Council". Human Development and Capability Association. 15 May 2013. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  12. "New HDCA Executive Council members elected!". Human Development and Capability Association. 8 June 2015. Retrieved 21 June 2015.
  13. "International Panel on Social Progress". International Panel on Social Progress . Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  14. International Panel on Social Progress (2018). Rethinking Society for the 21st Century: Report of the International Panel on Social Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9781108399579.
  15. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Henry S. Richardson".
Educational offices
Preceded by President of the Human Development and Capability Association
September 2014 – September 2016
Succeeded by
Ravi Kanbur
from September 2016