Jeff McMahan (philosopher)


Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American philosopher. He has been White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014.

Education and career

McMahan completed a B.A. degree in English literature at the University of the South. He completed a second B.A. degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics then did graduate work in philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his M.A. at the University of Oxford. He was offered a research studentship at the St. John's College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1983. He studied first under Jonathan Glover and Derek Parfit at the University of Oxford and was later supervised by Bernard Williams at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow of St. John's College from 1983 to 1986. He received his doctorate in 1986. His thesis title was Problems of Population Theory.
He taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and at Rutgers University.

Work

Bioethics

McMahan has written extensively on normative and applied ethics, especially on bioethics and just war theory. His main work in bioethics include The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. The book includes five parts, about identity, death, killing, the beginning of life and the end of life. In its first part, McMahan defends a mixed view of personal identity, claiming that individuals are what he calls "embodied minds". In the following parts, he claim that the badness of death and the wrongness of killing depends on our interest in living. He also defends what he calls a "time-relative interest account of living". According to his view, our interest in living depends on our psychological connection to our future selves at each time.

Animal ethics

In relation to his contributions in bioethics, McMahan has also written on the subject of animal ethics, where he has argued against the moral relevance of species membership. McMahan has also claimed that intensive animal farming is a major ethical problem. He has argued for a strong negative duty to stop the suffering inflicted on animals through modern industrial agriculture, and against the eating of animals McMahan has also participated in the ethical debate on wild animal suffering. He has also made a case for intervening in nature to alleviate the suffering of wild animals when doing so would not cause more harm than good.

Just war theory

McMahan's main contributions to just war theory are made in his book Killing in War, which argues against foundational elements of the traditional theory of the just war theory. Against Michael Walzer, he claims that those who fight an unjust war can never meet the requirements of jus in bello.

Other work

McMahan has also co-edited the books The Morality of Nationalism, and Ethics and Humanity. In the early 80's, he wrote two books about the political situation at the time: British Nuclear Weapons: For and Against, and Reagan and the World: Imperial Policy in the New Cold War. In more recent times, he has also done work on effective altruism.
He is on the editorial board of The Journal of Controversial Ideas.

Selected publications

Articles