Henry S. Richardson is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and is a Senior Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. At Harvard, he earned graduate degrees in law and in public policy and his Ph.D. in philosophy (with John Rawls; Martha Nussbaum supervised his Master’s thesis). He works in moral and political philosophy. For 2019–20, as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, he began a new book project on the division of moral labor. With the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020, however, he shifted his effort to writing a paper on the fair international allocation of vaccine with eighteen other authors. It came out in Science in Sept. 2020. Since then, he has written a paper arguing that Rawls's ideal society is flawed by its vulnerability to systematic, bigoted oppression arising within it and a companion paper examining potential ways of amending Rawls's theory to address this flaw.
He is the author of the following books:
- Practical Reasoning about Final Ends (Cambridge, 1994);
- Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (Oxford, 2002).
- Moral Entanglements: The Ancillary-Care Obligations of Medical Researchers (Oxford, 2012).
- Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism (Oxford, 2018). Listen to the New Books in Philosophy podcast on Articulating the Moral Community.
Dr. Richardson was the editor of Ethics (2008-2018).