Philip Pettit & The Birth of Ethics

Peter Stone thinks about a thought experiment about how ethics evolved.

- Peter Stone

Philip Pettit is perhaps the most important Irish moral and political philosopher alive today. Born in Ballygar, County Galway in 1945, Pettit studied at Maynooth College, the National University of Ireland, and Queen’s University, Belfast. He began his teaching career at University College Dublin in 1968, and held numerous other teaching positions before arriving at Princeton University, where he is currently Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values. He also serves as Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. Despite working in the United States and Australia, Pettit maintains ties to his native land, delivering, for instance, the inaugural Edmund Burke Lecture at Trinity College Dublin in 2007, and participating in President Michael D. Higgins’ Ethics Initiative in 2014.

Pettit has written numerous books on a variety of topics. He has, for example, for some time been an ardent advocate of republicanism. Long viewed as an alternative to liberalism, this political ideology (no relation to any political party) places nondomination at its core. According to republicans, a free society protects all its citizens, even (or especially) the most vulnerable, from subjection to the arbitrary whims of others. Pettit is also a strong proponent of group agency – the philosophical position that corporate bodies such as states or corporations can legitimately be regarded as agents in their own right, with agendas, beliefs, and preferences of their own. Only the existence of group agency, Pettit holds, can make sense of the way groups are able to function coherently over time despite the many differences among the individuals comprising them.