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Welcome to my homepage! By profession I am a university lecturer and researcher in moral, political, and social philosophy. I grew up in Ireland where I studied philosophy and French for my BA and philosophy for my MA (both at University College Dublin), followed by a couple of years of work in nonprofit administration. I then moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D in political science (University of Notre Dame). My doctoral dissertation is a critique of John Rawls's ideal of public reason, focusing in particular on the moral restrictions it places on public discourse; and an attempt to elaborate a virtue-ethical ideal of public reason that gives more scope to self-expression and ethical integrity in the public square. It can be accessed here.
After earning my Ph.D., I undertook further research and teaching, including a year of teaching at Bucknell, a year as postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University's Politics Department (James Madison Program), and three years of teaching at Villanova, outside Philadelphia. In September 2012 I was appointed Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, an interdisciplinary humanities and social science research centre founded in 2010 at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Although my primary appointment is in the institute, I have also lectured in the philosophy department and school of economics. I am affiliated to the Religion and Civil Society Project and currently Principal Investigator of the RESPUBLICA Project, a research project on governance and complexity financed by Fundación Ciudadanía y Valores.
My professional passion is the study of the conditions under which a functional human society – that is, a human society that supports the freedom and flourishing of its members - can be created and preserved over time. This fundamental concern has led me to develop a special interest in governance under conditions of complexity, the role of civil society associations in a free society, and normative theories of federalism. I believe my innate curiosity, diverse life experiences (having lived in U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Africa) and intellectual formation (having worked many years in Anglo-American as well as continental European intellectual environments) have afforded me a perspective on social order that is sufficiently broad and versatile to recognize patterns in social life that certain dominant Western narratives tend to conceal. In particular, I have become keenly sensitive to the order-conferring potential of civil society associations and the inability of a State-imposed order to adequately replicate the goods realized in small-scale community and institutional settings.
In my research, I endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of the lived experience of persons who seek to live meaningful and worthy lives in community with others, and to grasp the social and institutional conditions under which this aspiration can be satisfied. Because of the complexity and breadth of these questions, my research necessarily straddles the fields of ethics, political philosophy, social theory, institutional economics, and law. Specific issues I have taken up in my writings include prospects for ethical coherence in public roles, our responsibilities toward the distant needy, the moral justification of human rights, the limits of impartiality as a guide to moral judgment, the ethics of financial trading, and the challenge of building community in an individualistic culture.
The content of my early-career research was shaped, above all, by a desire to better understand the meaning of political order from the standpoint of a responsible person who, as Harry Frankfurt would put it, "takes himself/herself seriously." Two questions were of special interest to me: first, how can individual persons find the knowledge and motivation to contribute to the public life of their communities in a responsible and effective manner; and second, how can individual persons remain faithful to their own ethical commitments as they exercise their social and civic roles? This first phase of my research career gave rise to several journal articles, a book-length study entitled Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and an edited volume, The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (Springer, 2017).
I have now shifted to a new phase of my research, focusing not so much on the ethical standpoint of the individual person as on the standpoint of social order and institutional design. The question that drives my current research agenda is: How can human beings live free and flourishing lives, in a complex, culturally and morally diverse, and interdependent society? More specifically, how can they realize the distinctive goods of associational life and simultaneously submit to an inter-associational order, without becoming colonised by an overarching normative order such as that of the State, or of a multi-national corporation? I have translated this research agenda into several contributions to edited volumes, and most recently, a book (that I am currently finalising) entitled Civil Order After the Sovereign State: How Bottom-Up Federalism Undergirds the Freedom to Flourish.
The basic goal of Civil Order After the Sovereign State is to weaken the grip of ontologically austere, reductively individualist visions of society over the imagination of political theorists, and exhibit the advantages of a style of political theory that is more finely attuned to the complex needs of human associations and their participants. Highly centralised schemes of social cooperation that place an immense amount of regulatory, fiscal, and police power in the hands of a single government, are the contingent historical outcome of protracted struggles between rival powers. This contingent settlement may have contributed to a certain sort of social stability, but it also contains within it a logic of normative and institutional homogenisation that is fundamentally regressive from the perspective of those who wish to enjoy the benefits of a complex and multi-dimensional social ecology. I advocate replacing the principle of State sovereignty with a critical reappropriation of the federalist tradition of polycentric governance.
Some Reflections on The Academic Vocation
With the increasing professionalisation and specialisation of academic research, and the "race to the top" by departments, universities, and researchers, we academics rarely have time to step back from our craft and ask what exactly we are doing, and why. This is no small irony, given that we pride ourselves on our ability to adapt an "objective" and detached standpoint towards those human practices and behaviours that are the object of our study. For what it's worth, let me offer a few thoughts on why I think academic research is - or can be, under the right circumstances - a worthy and enriching endeavour. I will not pretend to speak for all forms of academic research; rather, I will focus on the broad field of research I am immersed in: the philosophical and moral study of human persons and societies.
Why do I spend hours poring over Aristotle's account of human virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics? Why do I want to understand better MacIntyre's objections against modern political institutions and practices? Why do I bother writing a critique of an article I disagree with, or crafting an article elaborating a normative ideal of social responsibility? Why do I present a polished paper, or a work-in-progress, at a political science conference? Why organise a reading group on Dietrich von Hildebrand's The Heart? And why spend two, three, or more years, researching and writing a book on freedom and governance after the nation-state?
The superficial and ready-to-hand answer is that these are the sorts of activities that enable one to become a "successful academic" as conventionally understood - that by raising one's own profile and publishing work of a high quality, one will advance more quickly in the system, and thereby attain the promised land of job security, prestige, and material comfort. Of course, very few people would affirm that prestige and wealth are the ultimate justification of academic research. However, many of us, at least some of the time, do seem to treat them as holding a deeper and more fundamental importance than they deserve. This is manifested in our attitude towards external indicators of quality and success, such as institutional affiliation, the ranking of publishers, salary level, and promotions: these sorts of indicators often instil in us a more profound respect and admiration than the intrinsic quality of a person's intelligence, insight, and writings.
Lest I be misunderstood, I want to emphasise that I am not dismissing the value and utility of conventional indicators of excellence. As a matter of fact, some such sorting mechanism is a practical necessity given the fact that we cannot each develop our own independent scale of academic values. After all, we have to cooperate with our peers, and departments have to hire candidates, based on criteria that have some basis in the "real world." Prestige and "brand recognition," in spite of their vulnerability to manipulation and idolisation, are necessary mechanisms for picking out quality when we have limited information and resources for determining the true worth of a scholar's work. Furthermore, imperfect as the current academic "economy of esteem" (Philip Pettit's phrase) may be, few would deny that it does track important values, insofar as the judgment of one's peers, at least much of the time, manages to track genuine values such as intelligence, insight, industry, productivity, and collegiality.
The Independent Value of Academic Research
But even if the academic economy of esteem, with all of its external indicators of success - promotion, tenure, academic prizes and grants, salary level, institutional affiliation, etc. - does frequently manage to track genuine values, I would contend that it is the independent values of academic research and teaching that we ought to attempt to understand and embody in our careers, rather than the external trappings of those values. Since I am currently dedicated to the study of ethics and social philosophy, i.e. the study of human and societal flourishing, I would like to reflect briefly on what I see as the value of my own research - independent of the external indicators of excellence and extrinsic rewards it might bring, and let others draw their own conclusions about the relevance of these remarks for their respective fields of research.
At bottom, I see two distinct values in the study of human and societal flourishing: first, the intrinsic value of understanding better who we are as human beings and as human societies. Coming to a more refined or nuanced understanding of our own nature, dispositions, capacities, and form of life, brings its own reward, quite apart from any "practical' benefit such knowledge might bring further down the line. As Aristotle taught us, "all men desire to know," and this includes knowledge of ourselves and the meaning of our lives. Although Aristotle asserted that ethics and political science are necessarily oriented towards praxis or action, I believe that understanding the human good is something we can also delight in for its own sake. There is something beautiful about advancing in our understanding of the meaning of our lives, something that cannot be reduced to the prospect of good action or a better future.
Nevertheless, the intrinsic reward of understanding ourselves better hardly exhausts the value of ethical and social theorising. Normative studies of the human person and the communities he or she inhabits (I set aside more empirical studies for the time being) are not neutral about outcomes: they endeavour to understand what it means for a human person and society to flourish or do well. Insofar as I can refine or improve my understanding of human and societal flourishing, I am a small step closer to living a better human life myself, and by sharing such insights with others, I may contribute in some small way to their understanding of the good, and thus help them, in a small but real way, to live a better life.
Hubris or Common Sense?
On its face, what I am suggesting may sound naive or even hubristic: who am I to pretend to offer genuine practical insights to others about how to live their lives? In response to this objection, it is important to underline that I see genuine academic research, in spite of its frequently solitary character, as being inherently dialogic, not monologic in orientation. The best academic research is informed by conversations, insights, observations, and data provided by people other than the researcher himself. In fact, even a researcher who consciously avoids conversations with others is bound, by the very nature of the discipline, to enter into conversation with his peers, via the literature he has a professional obligation to review and respond to. It seems to me that if we can legitimately learn from others, recognising genuine ethical insights in their work, then we should not shy away from reciprocating with our own insights as well. If I genuinely believed I had nothing of value to offer to my peers on these questions, I am not sure what the point of my research and writing would be! It would be reduced to either a purely critical venture, devoid of all constructive proposals, or, worse still, a vain exercise in casuistry or empty rhetoric, a mere instrument for attaining the recognition of my peers and/or attracting an income from my employer.
A second objection to the ambition of facilitating human and societal flourishing with one's research is that knowledge of the good does not guarantee a corresponding reform of one's behaviour. Many traitors know perfectly well that treachery is morally despicable; many adulterers know they are betraying a sacred trust; and even that pillar of integrity, St. Paul, complained that "the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do (Romans 7:19-20). This is what Christians call concupiscence, an effect of original sin; and what philosophers often speak of as "weakness of will" or "akrasia." So what can the student of the human good hope to contribute to good living, through his studies? Certainly not a cure for weakness of will, a panacea for human evil and injustice, or a direct reform of the wayward passions. But ideas, though not all-powerful, are not powerless. What we come to believe and understand about the world frequently has an influence on our behaviour, for better or for worse. Good ideas, if we choose to act on them, can lead to good behaviour; while bad ideas can corrupt behaviour. That is why cognitive therapy and logotherapy have arisen as influential forms of psychological treatment: psychologists recognise that our thought patterns, our ways of perceiving and processing data, can affect our behaviour in positive as well as negative ways.
Let me return to the original question: why do I spend a large chunk of my life reading, thinking, writing, presenting ideas at conferences, and conversing with colleagues about moral and social questions? The answer, it seems to me, is twofold: first, to get a better grip on the meaning of our lives as human beings - who we are and what makes our life meaningful and purposeful; and second, to lend intellectual support and some practical guidance to our own and others' efforts to improve our lives. That, in a nutshell, is what makes academic study a truly worthy and worthwhile endeavour from my perspective, at least in the field of moral, political, and social philosophy. If the endeavour can also bring some prestige and a decent income, all the better. But the integrity of our profession consists, above all, in our fidelity to its foundational values of well-grounded knowledge and moral improvement, not our success at winning the respect and recognition of our peers.
- University of Navarra, 12 Sept 2021
After earning my Ph.D., I undertook further research and teaching, including a year of teaching at Bucknell, a year as postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University's Politics Department (James Madison Program), and three years of teaching at Villanova, outside Philadelphia. In September 2012 I was appointed Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, an interdisciplinary humanities and social science research centre founded in 2010 at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Although my primary appointment is in the institute, I have also lectured in the philosophy department and school of economics. I am affiliated to the Religion and Civil Society Project and currently Principal Investigator of the RESPUBLICA Project, a research project on governance and complexity financed by Fundación Ciudadanía y Valores.
My professional passion is the study of the conditions under which a functional human society – that is, a human society that supports the freedom and flourishing of its members - can be created and preserved over time. This fundamental concern has led me to develop a special interest in governance under conditions of complexity, the role of civil society associations in a free society, and normative theories of federalism. I believe my innate curiosity, diverse life experiences (having lived in U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Africa) and intellectual formation (having worked many years in Anglo-American as well as continental European intellectual environments) have afforded me a perspective on social order that is sufficiently broad and versatile to recognize patterns in social life that certain dominant Western narratives tend to conceal. In particular, I have become keenly sensitive to the order-conferring potential of civil society associations and the inability of a State-imposed order to adequately replicate the goods realized in small-scale community and institutional settings.
In my research, I endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of the lived experience of persons who seek to live meaningful and worthy lives in community with others, and to grasp the social and institutional conditions under which this aspiration can be satisfied. Because of the complexity and breadth of these questions, my research necessarily straddles the fields of ethics, political philosophy, social theory, institutional economics, and law. Specific issues I have taken up in my writings include prospects for ethical coherence in public roles, our responsibilities toward the distant needy, the moral justification of human rights, the limits of impartiality as a guide to moral judgment, the ethics of financial trading, and the challenge of building community in an individualistic culture.
The content of my early-career research was shaped, above all, by a desire to better understand the meaning of political order from the standpoint of a responsible person who, as Harry Frankfurt would put it, "takes himself/herself seriously." Two questions were of special interest to me: first, how can individual persons find the knowledge and motivation to contribute to the public life of their communities in a responsible and effective manner; and second, how can individual persons remain faithful to their own ethical commitments as they exercise their social and civic roles? This first phase of my research career gave rise to several journal articles, a book-length study entitled Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and an edited volume, The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (Springer, 2017).
I have now shifted to a new phase of my research, focusing not so much on the ethical standpoint of the individual person as on the standpoint of social order and institutional design. The question that drives my current research agenda is: How can human beings live free and flourishing lives, in a complex, culturally and morally diverse, and interdependent society? More specifically, how can they realize the distinctive goods of associational life and simultaneously submit to an inter-associational order, without becoming colonised by an overarching normative order such as that of the State, or of a multi-national corporation? I have translated this research agenda into several contributions to edited volumes, and most recently, a book (that I am currently finalising) entitled Civil Order After the Sovereign State: How Bottom-Up Federalism Undergirds the Freedom to Flourish.
The basic goal of Civil Order After the Sovereign State is to weaken the grip of ontologically austere, reductively individualist visions of society over the imagination of political theorists, and exhibit the advantages of a style of political theory that is more finely attuned to the complex needs of human associations and their participants. Highly centralised schemes of social cooperation that place an immense amount of regulatory, fiscal, and police power in the hands of a single government, are the contingent historical outcome of protracted struggles between rival powers. This contingent settlement may have contributed to a certain sort of social stability, but it also contains within it a logic of normative and institutional homogenisation that is fundamentally regressive from the perspective of those who wish to enjoy the benefits of a complex and multi-dimensional social ecology. I advocate replacing the principle of State sovereignty with a critical reappropriation of the federalist tradition of polycentric governance.
Some Reflections on The Academic Vocation
With the increasing professionalisation and specialisation of academic research, and the "race to the top" by departments, universities, and researchers, we academics rarely have time to step back from our craft and ask what exactly we are doing, and why. This is no small irony, given that we pride ourselves on our ability to adapt an "objective" and detached standpoint towards those human practices and behaviours that are the object of our study. For what it's worth, let me offer a few thoughts on why I think academic research is - or can be, under the right circumstances - a worthy and enriching endeavour. I will not pretend to speak for all forms of academic research; rather, I will focus on the broad field of research I am immersed in: the philosophical and moral study of human persons and societies.
Why do I spend hours poring over Aristotle's account of human virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics? Why do I want to understand better MacIntyre's objections against modern political institutions and practices? Why do I bother writing a critique of an article I disagree with, or crafting an article elaborating a normative ideal of social responsibility? Why do I present a polished paper, or a work-in-progress, at a political science conference? Why organise a reading group on Dietrich von Hildebrand's The Heart? And why spend two, three, or more years, researching and writing a book on freedom and governance after the nation-state?
The superficial and ready-to-hand answer is that these are the sorts of activities that enable one to become a "successful academic" as conventionally understood - that by raising one's own profile and publishing work of a high quality, one will advance more quickly in the system, and thereby attain the promised land of job security, prestige, and material comfort. Of course, very few people would affirm that prestige and wealth are the ultimate justification of academic research. However, many of us, at least some of the time, do seem to treat them as holding a deeper and more fundamental importance than they deserve. This is manifested in our attitude towards external indicators of quality and success, such as institutional affiliation, the ranking of publishers, salary level, and promotions: these sorts of indicators often instil in us a more profound respect and admiration than the intrinsic quality of a person's intelligence, insight, and writings.
Lest I be misunderstood, I want to emphasise that I am not dismissing the value and utility of conventional indicators of excellence. As a matter of fact, some such sorting mechanism is a practical necessity given the fact that we cannot each develop our own independent scale of academic values. After all, we have to cooperate with our peers, and departments have to hire candidates, based on criteria that have some basis in the "real world." Prestige and "brand recognition," in spite of their vulnerability to manipulation and idolisation, are necessary mechanisms for picking out quality when we have limited information and resources for determining the true worth of a scholar's work. Furthermore, imperfect as the current academic "economy of esteem" (Philip Pettit's phrase) may be, few would deny that it does track important values, insofar as the judgment of one's peers, at least much of the time, manages to track genuine values such as intelligence, insight, industry, productivity, and collegiality.
The Independent Value of Academic Research
But even if the academic economy of esteem, with all of its external indicators of success - promotion, tenure, academic prizes and grants, salary level, institutional affiliation, etc. - does frequently manage to track genuine values, I would contend that it is the independent values of academic research and teaching that we ought to attempt to understand and embody in our careers, rather than the external trappings of those values. Since I am currently dedicated to the study of ethics and social philosophy, i.e. the study of human and societal flourishing, I would like to reflect briefly on what I see as the value of my own research - independent of the external indicators of excellence and extrinsic rewards it might bring, and let others draw their own conclusions about the relevance of these remarks for their respective fields of research.
At bottom, I see two distinct values in the study of human and societal flourishing: first, the intrinsic value of understanding better who we are as human beings and as human societies. Coming to a more refined or nuanced understanding of our own nature, dispositions, capacities, and form of life, brings its own reward, quite apart from any "practical' benefit such knowledge might bring further down the line. As Aristotle taught us, "all men desire to know," and this includes knowledge of ourselves and the meaning of our lives. Although Aristotle asserted that ethics and political science are necessarily oriented towards praxis or action, I believe that understanding the human good is something we can also delight in for its own sake. There is something beautiful about advancing in our understanding of the meaning of our lives, something that cannot be reduced to the prospect of good action or a better future.
Nevertheless, the intrinsic reward of understanding ourselves better hardly exhausts the value of ethical and social theorising. Normative studies of the human person and the communities he or she inhabits (I set aside more empirical studies for the time being) are not neutral about outcomes: they endeavour to understand what it means for a human person and society to flourish or do well. Insofar as I can refine or improve my understanding of human and societal flourishing, I am a small step closer to living a better human life myself, and by sharing such insights with others, I may contribute in some small way to their understanding of the good, and thus help them, in a small but real way, to live a better life.
Hubris or Common Sense?
On its face, what I am suggesting may sound naive or even hubristic: who am I to pretend to offer genuine practical insights to others about how to live their lives? In response to this objection, it is important to underline that I see genuine academic research, in spite of its frequently solitary character, as being inherently dialogic, not monologic in orientation. The best academic research is informed by conversations, insights, observations, and data provided by people other than the researcher himself. In fact, even a researcher who consciously avoids conversations with others is bound, by the very nature of the discipline, to enter into conversation with his peers, via the literature he has a professional obligation to review and respond to. It seems to me that if we can legitimately learn from others, recognising genuine ethical insights in their work, then we should not shy away from reciprocating with our own insights as well. If I genuinely believed I had nothing of value to offer to my peers on these questions, I am not sure what the point of my research and writing would be! It would be reduced to either a purely critical venture, devoid of all constructive proposals, or, worse still, a vain exercise in casuistry or empty rhetoric, a mere instrument for attaining the recognition of my peers and/or attracting an income from my employer.
A second objection to the ambition of facilitating human and societal flourishing with one's research is that knowledge of the good does not guarantee a corresponding reform of one's behaviour. Many traitors know perfectly well that treachery is morally despicable; many adulterers know they are betraying a sacred trust; and even that pillar of integrity, St. Paul, complained that "the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do (Romans 7:19-20). This is what Christians call concupiscence, an effect of original sin; and what philosophers often speak of as "weakness of will" or "akrasia." So what can the student of the human good hope to contribute to good living, through his studies? Certainly not a cure for weakness of will, a panacea for human evil and injustice, or a direct reform of the wayward passions. But ideas, though not all-powerful, are not powerless. What we come to believe and understand about the world frequently has an influence on our behaviour, for better or for worse. Good ideas, if we choose to act on them, can lead to good behaviour; while bad ideas can corrupt behaviour. That is why cognitive therapy and logotherapy have arisen as influential forms of psychological treatment: psychologists recognise that our thought patterns, our ways of perceiving and processing data, can affect our behaviour in positive as well as negative ways.
Let me return to the original question: why do I spend a large chunk of my life reading, thinking, writing, presenting ideas at conferences, and conversing with colleagues about moral and social questions? The answer, it seems to me, is twofold: first, to get a better grip on the meaning of our lives as human beings - who we are and what makes our life meaningful and purposeful; and second, to lend intellectual support and some practical guidance to our own and others' efforts to improve our lives. That, in a nutshell, is what makes academic study a truly worthy and worthwhile endeavour from my perspective, at least in the field of moral, political, and social philosophy. If the endeavour can also bring some prestige and a decent income, all the better. But the integrity of our profession consists, above all, in our fidelity to its foundational values of well-grounded knowledge and moral improvement, not our success at winning the respect and recognition of our peers.
- University of Navarra, 12 Sept 2021
