What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Russ Shafer-Landau, Elliott R. Sober Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin-Madison, talks about growing up Jewish in Pennsylvania, rock collecting, the Phillies, being imaginatively stunted, drums, getting into Freud, Nietzsche, and Camus, the point of existence, Walter Kaufmann, existential dread at Brown, taking a year off and getting a record contract, returning to school with a renewed sense of purpose, taking classes with Martha Nussbaum, working on the index for The Fragility of Goodness, doing conceptual analysis with Chisholm, his anti-analytic philosophy phase, deciding to go to grad school for philosophy instead of business school, running out of money after a year of classes at Oxford, finishing up grad school at University of Arizona, his logical ineptitude, discovering philosophy of law, advice for grad students, applying to ninety jobs and getting one offer, what’s up with Kansas, switching from constructivism to realism, how metaethics has changed, the popularity of Cornell Realism and expressivism, The Moral Universe, how 9/11 motivated him, philosophically, Trollope, Lakecia Benjamin, and his last meal…

[8/5/2024]

Where did you grow up?

My family hopped around a fair bit until I was six, and then we settled down in an old farmhouse outside Norristown, PA, which was already (this is the very early 1970s) strongly on the wane.

What was the culture like?

I went to school with mostly working class kids, divided about evenly among Irish, Italians, and Blacks. The culture was basically: Go Eagles!

What did your parents do, and what was your family like? Rich? Poor? Religious household? Academic?

My dad worked in insurance and my mom was a homemaker. We were comfortably middle class. I knew I’d have new clothes when I needed them, that I was going to get three meals a day, and that my parents would leave us with a terrible babysitter for two weeks a year while they went off on some business-sponsored vacation. My dad got a perfunctory college education and my mom quit college after a year once I unexpectedly came along. She did go back and get her degree, and an MA to boot, once I and my brother and sister were teenagers. We had books in the house and I was always encouraged to read whatever I wanted. I never knew an academic growing up; the first one I met was as a freshman in college. We were cultural Jews, very reform. To my knowledge neither of my parents believed or now believe in god. I never did. My sister and I were two of the four Jews in a high school of two thousand kids. That wasn’t fun.

Antisemitism?

Yes. Sometimes prompted by casual ignorance, sometimes by malice. But often enough.  

As a little kid, what were you interested in?

Lots of things. Not philosophy. Rock collecting. Coin collecting. Biographies. History. Any ball sport. I was a die-hard Philly sports fan. So I learned about disappointment from a very early age.

Ha! What did you want to be when you grew up?

I honestly had no thoughts along these lines. My mom, who wrongly believed I was the perfect child, told me that I could be anything, though she favored my becoming president. I toyed with that for a day but had read biographies of all the US presidents and knew the assassination rate was pretty bad, so I decided against it. But I didn’t replace it with anything. This is because I lack imagination. I am just not the kind of person who envisions all sorts of futures and thinks seriously about what it would be like to inhabit them. The flip side is that I devote almost no time to contemplating the past and imagining how things could have gone better. So being imaginatively stunted is not all bad.

Favorite classes and teachers in high school?

I hated high school. But I did have an English teacher I connected with who gave me novels to read and was willing to talk to me as an adult outside of class. Don’t ask me about calculus. Or physics. Or chemistry.

Extracurriculars?

I was captain of the tennis team, which consistently earned the bottom spot in our conference. I was among the worst wrestlers in our high school’s history. I loved baseball. I played the drums nearly every day of my life from age six, when we moved to a larger house and my dad’s drum set came out of storage. Among my star turns was a stint in a fife and drum corps that played at Valley Forge (ten minutes from where I grew up) for various Bicentennial celebrations.

What else was on your mind outside of school?

How to leave Norristown forever.

Were you affected by world events at the time?

Not noticeably.

The culture, like music, movies, TV or politics?

I had bell bottoms and rayon shirts and listened to the radio a lot. I had no tastes that set me apart from anyone else in my cohort—I listened to the music they listened to, watched the same TV shows as everyone else did, went to the same movies, was as apolitical as my parents.

What were you passionate about, if anything?

I always loved playing the drums. Loved rock music. Enjoyed competing in sports and spelling bees. I wanted to be the smartest kid in school and nearly was (at least judging by grades). Then I discovered philosophy…

What did you worry about?

Before age 14: whether the Eagles, Phillies, 76ers, or Flyers would win tonight’s game. After age 14: the pointlessness of existence.

Any deep thoughts back then?

None. But I thought I had plenty. When I was 14 I was sent off to work as a prep cook in a hotel in the Berkshires. The head chef was a philosophy grad student at Columbia and he took me under his wing for some inexplicable reason and introduced me to Freud, Nietzsche, and Camus. I am far from a morose person but I had a four year stretch where that was a very apt description.

You still read any Freud, Nietzsche, or Camus?

Very little, sadly—they’re so much fun.

Still in touch with the dude who took you under his wing?

Sadly, I lost touch with the dude. Those were the days (mid-1970s) where you had to call or write to someone to keep in touch. I never got his phone number, and at some point one of my letters got returned and I lost track of him.

Still think existence is pointless?

My existence has a point! Or so I keep telling myself. Yours does, too.

What's the point of your existence?

I don’t think there’s just one point. Nor do I think the point is the same for everyone. In my case, one point is to help my students grow. Another is to show love for my family. Another is to think as well as I can about my corner of philosophy.

Get in trouble?

No, I was a first-born rule-follower with limited imagination (see above).

How were you similar to, and different from, the rest of your friends and family?

Within my family, I was the brainy one. I knew more facts, spent lots more time reading, enjoyed going to the library to research arcana, got the best grades. My sister communed with trees and now lives in an ashram in rural Tennessee. My brother never read a book til after college and became a millionaire. No one in my family really has a sense of what philosophy is but they have never been disparaging about it, either.

Where did you apply to college and why?

I applied to a bunch of Ivy League schools and little Ivies. There was a pretty anti-intellectual vibe in my high school. Only a few kids from my class of around 500 went to college. I wanted to go to school with people who had broader life experiences than I did and who were intellectually open and curious.

I really wanted to go to Princeton and my parents drove me there for an interview. When the admissions officer asked why Princeton, I told him that I wanted to take courses there with Walter Kaufmann, whose translations of Nietzsche I had been reading for the past few years. I was then informed that Professor Kaufmann had died a few months earlier. (The rejection letter landed soon afterwards.) Fortunately I got into Brown…

So, it sounds like you did get into philosophy in your teens, and you were serious enough about it that you wanted to pursue it in college. Did you start off as a philosophy major at Brown? Did you consider doing anything else?

We didn’t have to decide on a major until our junior year, but I did go to college thinking that I was going to major in Philosophy. I went hoping to learn about the meaning of life. There weren’t any courses like that on the books, so I took what I thought was the next best thing, an upper level ethics class. I found it totally boring and then flailed about in other departments hoping to find classes that spoke to my existential dread. I failed. I decided to leave college after my sophomore year to get my head straight—I felt, correctly, that I was wasting a great opportunity.

Did your parents freak when you decided to take a year off?

No. They were a bit worried, but for the most part were cool about it.

What did you do during the year off?

During my year off I was a drummer in a prog-rock band. We finally got a recording contract and I had to decide whether I wanted to live in a van or in a college dorm. I opted to go back to school. During my year off I decided to reinvest myself in philosophy, and thought it’d be a good idea to start with the ancients. I read a lot of Greek philosophy and drama, and when I returned to school I took a class on ancient philosophy with a professor who’d just taken a job there—Martha Nussbaum. Talk about luck. She was discussing things that really mattered, in her brilliant way, so inspiring. She was incredibly generous with her time, doing a two-semester independent study with me and a friend that ranged from Descartes to Kant. She also hired me to do the two indexes on her first, amazing book, The Fragility of Goodness. I had about 2,000 index cards all over my tiny room. Once I became an academic I vowed never to do an index of my own—I got a life’s worth of that in the summer of 1984!

What was the name of the band?

Next.

Any other inspirational teachers?

Oh, did I mention that I also took a course from Rod Chisholm on my return to Brown? Talk about a double whammy. He was a master in the classroom. He just walked in with a sheaf of notes, wrote a definition or a thesis on the board, and then started asking questions about its plausibility. He and the class would do philosophy together. In my last two years at Brown I took all the classes I could with Nussbaum and Chisholm.

Classic Chisholm!

I imagine your conception of philosophy evolved in college. How? And how did you grow, as a person?

When I returned to college I was still thinking that “proper” philosophy had to be done as my existentialist heroes had done it. During my year off I’d written a 100-page essay that was chock-full of nasty epithets aimed at analytic philosophy. I handed it to Rod Chisholm, Ernie Sosa, and Phil Quinn and, to my amazement still, they each read and gave some comments on it and did not try to talk me down from my ignorant hauteur. Instead, they offered gentle encouragement to someone whose self-possession vastly exceeded his talents. I came to see that philosophy written clearly and, ideally, elegantly had great value. Since those first philosophy classes I sought to write as clearly as I could. I still do. I don’t regard myself as an elegant writer. But I do try.

I’m not the sort of person who spends time registering my improvements, failings, or mere changes, so I am genuinely uncertain about what (if any) personal growth occurred during this period in my life. I can say, though, that I came to college thinking I was hot shit. And left college, thankfully, thinking that I wasn’t.

Personal or academic challenges?

Personally, my time in college was terrific. I finally felt that I had met my people, so many of whom had such interesting backgrounds or ideas or both. The only challenges, once I got back, came from trying to figure out what the philosophers I was reading were really saying. The right kind of challenges.

Partying? Politics? Love?

I’m a mild partier, always have been. I was not very political. As for love: I found the love of my life the very day I returned to Brown. I was immediately smitten. She was immediately forgetful that we’d met. I gently wooed her for many months and she eventually found something to like. We’ve been pretty much inseparable for forty years.

When did you decide to go to grad school? Where did you want to go and why? Receive any guidance on that front?

I decided to go to grad school in the fall of my senior year. I had no thought of becoming a professor. None. I measured myself against my professors and told myself that there was no way that I could ever be even remotely as talented as them. I inferred that academia was not for me. True premise, false conclusion. At Brown there was a really anti-preprofessional environment and I fully took that in, so it came as a shock when, in senior year, I started to see all these laid-back kids dressed up and off to meetings with corporate recruiters. I had absolutely no plans for what to do after college and my dad was a businessman so I naturally thought I’d go into “business,” too. No idea which one, but many Fortune 500 companies came to campus back then so I figured I’d just go try to get hired by one of them and get trained up and someday make some money. I registered for a bunch of those interview meetings; just before my first one I put on my suit and found that I could not walk out the door. I took off my suit, cancelled my meetings, and went to talk with Martha about grad school.

My thinking was so simple. I felt I needed just one more year immersed in philosophy before I could cement my understanding and, duly armed, go out and do something real. So I applied to grad school, with Martha telling me which schools to try for. There was no internet back then and no way, other than asking your professors, to learn about which schools had good programs. I did not want to impose and so did not ask Martha to read my application essay, which in retrospect was a major error, since I stated in it that I was only intending to stay in grad school for a year and definitely did not see myself as professor material. At that time I wanted to study ancient philosophy and somehow—well, doubtless on the strength of Martha’s recommendation—Oxford and Cambridge let me in. Everywhere else rejected me.

Oxford, Cambridge, how did you choose?

Oxford had at the time, and perhaps still does, the largest philosophy faculty in the English-speaking world. Way more philosophers there than at Cambridge, and I’d heard of more of them, so off to Oxford I went.

Was grad school what you expected?

I had no idea what to expect. I’d never been overseas before (well, I was born in Paris, not a glamorous tale, and came to the States when I was two, so no memories). And I’d never talked to any of the grad students at Brown about what their day-to-day was like. Basically, clueless.

When I went to Oxford everything excited me. I had wonderful tutorials with John Ackrill in ancient and David Charles in ethics. I attended lots of lecture classes—I recall especially sitting in on a series of lectures in philosophy of mind with Jonathan Glover, and metaphysics with David Wiggins.

I went to Oxford to do a B.Phil. but ran out of money after one year.

That must’ve been a bummer! But was this a surprise?

To call it a surprise implies that I had thought that far ahead and was disappointed in my expectations. But I really hadn’t thought ahead at all—I was just super-excited to be going abroad and studying in such a place. I managed to afford my first year with a scholarship from Brown and a lucrative summer gig working construction, but those weren’t on the cards for year 2, so I returned to the U.S., where I could go to school for free and get a stipend for TA-ing. I applied to six or seven places and got rejected by every one except Arizona. I don’t recall whether I re-used my application letter, but I was probably naïve enough to have done just that. Luckily once more, at that point I was really interested in doing ancient philosophy and one of Martha Nussbaum’s best friends was Julia Annas, who taught at—Arizona. So, yes, “grateful to Martha” undersells things.

How'd the partner deal with the moves, first to Oxford, then to Arizona?

Sue was not crazy about either Oxford or Arizona. When we went to Oxford she’d just graduated from Brown as well, and because we were not engaged or married at the time, she was forbidden a work permit. So she felt like she was twiddling her thumbs that year. When we drove into Tucson in early August of 1987 her first impression was that this is no fit place for human beings. She never stopped believing that.

Philosophically, what was trending at Arizona, and in general? What excited you, philosophically?

I had no idea of trends. What was definitely not trendy was Wittgenstein. So far as I can recall, no one at Brown or at Arizona ever mentioned his name, much less taught his work in class.

So Wittgenstein was big at Oxford. Who’d you study with at Arizona?

When I went to Arizona I took classes my first year with Allen Buchanan and Joel Feinberg in philosophy of law—a large field I never knew existed. Those were super-exciting. I also did a year-long independent study with Julia Annas in ancient philosophy. Though she was terrific, my interest in that area had begun to fade—especially as I realized that I had absolutely no facility for languages.

What was the dissertation on? Was your dissertation advisor engaged?

Indeterminacy in the law and in morality. It was half metaethics-y and half philosophy of law. Joel Feinberg directed it. He was amazing at giving feedback on seminar papers—pages and pages of comments. When it came to the dissertation, though, I am not sure he ever read it. The wonderful Tom Christiano, at that point (1992) a new assistant professor in the department, gave me the most feedback.

Was grad school challenging?

The most challenging part of grad school was advanced logic, which I passed only because my professor, Vann McGee, took immense pity on me. Though Arizona did not have a plus or minus grading system, he gave me a B double-minus, which was still more than I deserved.

Dig the dissertation writing process?

I struggled to find a dissertation topic—read around in moral philosophy for many months hoping for inspiration before returning to an idea I had at the very beginning of the process. Once I settled on the topic I dug in and wrote and wrote. I loved writing that dissertation. And I almost lost the entire thing—back then I had a huge laptop and wrote my thesis on it and did not back it up. I was out of town on my last on-campus job interview and our place got broken into. Thieves stole my wife’s costume jewelry, our TV, and all the coins in our change jar. They left the laptop sitting on the dining room table. I’ve been a compulsive backer-upper ever since!

Advice for graduate students? Were you encouraged to publish?

I have loads of advice for grad students. But I’ll stick with two things. First, as much as possible, pursue what you’re excited about. Grad school is hard, and you’re not always in control of your time, so to the extent possible, make sure to attend to what piques your curiosity and interest, even if it doesn’t seem like such a great idea, professionally.

And now for some pre-professional advice from someone who (with a two-year hiatus when I went to UNC) has been department placement director since 1992. And that is: publications in good places, and talks in good venues. The market is so competitive now that you need to have these in order stand a chance at landing a job. You want to teach at a community college or a teaching-intensive 4-year school? You still need these. (Are there exceptions? Yes. Should you count on being one of them? No.)

When I went on the market in 1991-92 we didn’t have a placement director, and there was no push to publish or give talks at conferences. I had published a version of my M.A. thesis, but that was it. It was in philosophy of law, I sent it as my writing sample when applying to jobs, none of which was in philosophy of law. I had given only one talk, a short comment at an APA session attended by two people. Somehow, I still got a job. The good old days.

So, this is how things are now. Is this how they should be?

Though there are real downsides of the early professionalization we now see among grad students, I can’t think of a better way to initially vet for future colleagues than by placing emphasis on their publications and presentations. (That said, recall the point about my limited imagination and discount my reply accordingly. And add that you also need to have a strong teaching record.) Search committee members often have only 4-6 weeks to sift through hundreds of dossiers while also teaching and grading and meeting various deadlines and having a life outside of their job. Ideally, each committee member would have the time to read and think carefully about every writing sample and thoroughly scrutinize every teaching dossier. Since that’s not our world, some heuristics are helpful.

What were your fellow grad students like? Competitive? Friendly? Who did you hang out with and what did you do to unwind?

Oh, we were not at all competitive. There were about thirty of us jammed together in three contiguous rooms. We talked a lot, were friendly. I was one of the few students who were partnered up at that point so I did spend a lot of my time with Sue (my girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife). The first week of grad school I met someone who was to become one of my friends for life, David Gill, a delightful person who was much smarter than I and who, when we went on the job market together, got all the great interviews and landed the open job at Berkeley. (He’s since left the profession.) He and I spent lots of time at the bowling alley, he eating corn dogs and I sincerely professing disgust.

You vegan or vegetarian? If so, what convinced you? If not, why not? I eat meat, but I am convinced if there are moral facts, it is morally wrong.

There are moral facts, it is wrong (usually), and I do it anyway. I am not proud of that. I am not sure why individual meat purchases and consumption are wrong—my second publication was on this problem, which still puzzles me—but I am fairly sure that they are (ordinarily) wrong. That said, my revulsion at the corn dog is not moral but aesthetic. Corn dogs are by their nature foul things.

How did your interests change at Arizona?

As I said, when I went to Arizona I didn’t know philosophy of law existed; once I discovered it, I went deep. I even entered the PhD/JD program in my second year, thinking that since I wasn’t talented enough to be a philosophy professor I could indulge my passion for philosophy and have a safe career option to boot, all the while not having to pay for my law degree. The first semester of my second year I spent over at the law school. No one there—not the students, not the faculty—seemed to have any interest in the philosophical aspects of the law. I felt like a real outsider and left the program after a semester. The material was so interesting (civil procedure aside), but the only folks who wanted to talk about it in the way I wanted to were over in the Philosophy department.

Some time in my second or third year I took a metaethics course with Ron Milo. I hadn’t known til then that there was a subdiscipline of philosophy that focused on all these questions I’d been so interested in. Ron was an incredibly careful thinker and really gave me an education in the area. He was very self-deprecating. You could spot him from a mile away—he was the one with the bow-legged walk, from riding his horses for so many years out on his farm in the Chiricahua mountains.

What was your first time teaching in the classroom like?

That happened my first year at Arizona. I TA’d for 115 students. My lead professor was not, shall we say, a cuddly person. When he visited one of my sections he interrupted me several times to point out mistakes I was making. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, yes?

That episode aside, I felt at home in the classroom from the start. I was very nervous going in, thinking I knew so little and unsure of how to structure my sections or grade fairly. But it came pretty naturally and I found that I really enjoyed it. Still do.

What was the market like when you finished?

Well, unlike today, you could still get a job with no publications and no talks. But it was not the “old-boy” network I’d heard stories about when my own professors described their hiring—no jobs newsletter, just a phone call from the hiring department to the chair of a top program, asking who might be a good fit for the post. By the end of my fourth year at Arizona I had passed my comprehensives and got the sense that I could succeed in the field. I’d given up my view that in order to be adequate in the job I had to be as talented as my professors. So, in my last year (funding was strictly capped to 5 years), I tried my hand on the market. I was so naïve. I knew nothing about it. I recall my wife and I having a conversation about which New England state I should take a job in—as if I would have a choice in the matter!

Ha! How many applications did you send out?

I applied to about 80 or 90 places, got more than a dozen interviews at the Eastern APA, flew out to 6 or 7 places—and ultimately got rejected by every school but one. Apparently a running theme in my life.

Job market horror stories?

No horror stories, unless you count being yelled at for the stupidity of my ideas by one interviewer, having another fall into my lap, asleep, and having yet another progressively incline in his chair until he, too, fell asleep—and in his case, he was the only interviewer in the room. So no, definitely no horror stories.

To my knowledge I’ve only ever had one panic attack in my life. That was when, perhaps a dozen years after my APA interviews in 1991, the APA returned to the Marriott Marquis in NYC. As I walked into the lobby I was completely overtaken by anxiety. I had never felt this way before and didn’t remember that this was where I had been put through the paces so many years earlier. Once I figured it out it all made sense, I regained my composure—and spent as little of the rest of the conference in the hotel as possible. Never set foot in it again!

Where did you land your first gig?

University of Kansas. Loved that job. Ten years later, when I received an offer from UW, we initially decided to move to Madison. And then we decided to stay in Kansas. And then we re-decided to move to Madison, while also deciding not to allow ourselves to make any further decisions. But it was very hard to leave Kansas.

Interpret this question however you wish: What's the deal with Kansas?

Underappreciated fly-over country. Lawrence is a fantastic town and was a great place to raise our kids for a decade.

How did you become convinced of the truth of non-natural moral realism? 

By the time I was done grad school I had become convinced that morality was in some strong sense objective. Towards the end of my time at Kansas I decided that my objectivist leanings were inadequately worked out. So I decided to write a book, thinking that the process of doing so would help me get my views in order. It did! At the outset I just dismissed nonnaturalism—everyone else did. I set out to defend a version of non-Kantian constructivism that would explain how individuals and societies could still be quite wrong in their basic moral views. In the process of writing I became convinced that constructivism was mistaken and that realism was the way to go. As for the nonnaturalism: while my take on how best to mark the natural/nonnatural divide has shifted over time, I’ve never been remotely tempted to try to assimilate moral features to those of the natural world.

Largest differences between Kansas and UW Madison? Best part of UW Madison? Worst parts? Be honest!

Self-conception and resources. There is a sense at UW that you are at a world-class institution that can attract the best folks from around the world. UW also has deeper pockets that can fund the greater ambitions of its faculty. The purse-strings at KU were much tighter and I think remain that way. For me, the best part of being at UW is my colleagues, who are fantastic and, miraculously for a group of about 20, all reasonable people without big egos. The worst part has nothing to do with the department and everything to do with February. And March. And April.

3 philosophical accomplishments you are most proud of?

Umm…I think my book on nonnaturalist realism that came out about twenty years ago did a lot to resuscitate the view. For several decades prior to its publication anyone caught expressing sympathy with the view would have been met with an incredulous stare. Of course there are still plenty of philosophers who think the view is batty, but it’s no longer summarily dismissed. I don’t know if this counts as properly philosophical, but I did inaugurate MadMeta (the annual Madison Metaethics workshop) 21 years ago, and I think that it has fostered a supportive sense of community in our field, has helped launch several careers, and has had a nice trickle-down effect in inspiring others to start annual workshops of their own. Last but not least, I think the work I’ve done as a textbook editor and author has benefited students who will never be philosophy majors but who have come away with a much better view of philosophy than they might otherwise have. Actually, now that I’m on an immodest roll I do want to mention one other thing—I am probably the longest-serving placement director in the country. This fall I’ll be starting my 30th year in the role. In that long stretch I have helped a lot of our students navigate a very anxious time in their life, usually with good results. That’s the most rewarding kind of service.

Since your career has started, how has metaethics changed? Like, which views are surprisingly popular or unpopular, given their reception when you started?

I think the biggest change, as noted above, is that nonnaturalism is back on the table. Metaethics is also much more established now as a subdiscipline in its own right. One surprise is the relative dearth of developments of naturalist realism—when I was coming up the Cornell realism of Sturgeon, Boyd, Railton, Copp, and Brink seemed like the next big thing, with a promising research program that has not (Copp’s work aside) been systematically developed. Another surprise is the rise of constitutivism, which was discussed only glancingly, if at all, when I was in grad school. Chris Korsgaard gets the lion’s share of credit for that—The Sources of Normativity (1996) captured many hearts and minds and inspired a new generation to take constitutivism seriously. One last surprise: after deep, powerful book-length treatments of expressivism by Blackburn and Gibbard, we’re 2+ decades on and there have been only piecemeal efforts to extend the expressivist research program.

Exciting projects in the works?

I’ve been collaborating with John Bengson and Terence Cuneo for a decade on a project that was supposed to be one book and has turned into three. The first (Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory) came out a couple of years ago. The second (The Moral Universe) was just published and offers a new version of nonnaturalist moral realism focused on the metaphysical and normative dimensions of morality. Up next: Grasping Morality, designed to complement The Moral Universe but with a focus instead on issues in moral epistemology, moral psychology, and action theory. We are not speed demons so I expect this to take several more years before calling it a wrap.

Do you have kids? If so, how does philosophy inform your parenting and your parenting inform your philosophy? Do your philosophical views influence your non-philosophical behavior?

My wife and I do have kids, though Sophie is now 29 and Max is 32, so “well-launched adults” is more like it. I wish I could say that being a moral realist made me a better dad, but I really doubt it. And being a parent did not make me a better philosopher—or, if it did, only indirectly, by so frequently reminding me of my own fallibility.

In general, how have all of the world events—9/11, Iraq, Trump, COVID-- that have happened since you were in grad school informed your philosophical views? Is metaethics political? In general, if you want to change the world, or minds, is philosophy the way to do it? If not, what is philosophy for, exactly?

9/11 was very much on my mind when I wrote my second book, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? I took for granted that the bombers had done something morally horrific, and sought to show that anyone who shared that view should regard morality as objective. I wrote that in (for me) record time, less than a year, in 2-hour windows after the kids went to bed. It was 2003 and I was naïve enough to think that the book, pitched to non-philosophers, would actually have some influence in the wider world.

So, is metaethics political?

Not discernibly. But then my powers of discernment are not that fine. If you want to change the world and have a philosophical bent, you can take the chance that you’ll be among the very rare philosophers whose ideas have been picked up, not mangled by political leaders, and implemented on a broad scale. A much better bet: if you are beset by philosophical questions and have the great luxury of being paid to spend a chunk of your time trying to answer them, then go for it. If you want to change the world in a big way, then unless you’re the next Peter Singer, best to either reduce your ambitions or leave academia and kickstart your political career.

How are your philosophical views informed by developments in our understanding of human psychology?

Very little. I’m woefully ignorant of recent developments in psychology.

Aliens land, find you, knock on your office door, sit down, ask "Why can't moral facts be studied scientifically?" What's your answer?

“I’m impressed by your English skills and your jaunty little antennae.” Then: “Read The Moral Universe. It’s all there.”

But, like, in a nutshell? They have places to be!

Moral properties have ineliminably normative essences, and science knows nothing of such things.

What argument against non-natural moral realism do you find most troubling and why?

Finally, a softball!

The argument can be put many different ways but the core challenge is for nonnaturalists to explain how we can grasp a moral reality not of our own making. I know that genocide and malicious humiliation are wrong. You do, too. Explaining that is no easy task.

Are your philosophical views influenced by non-rational factors, you think? What are your biases and how do you combat them?

I’m sure they are, though if I knew what they were, I’d hopefully revise my views accordingly. I’m only rarely able to identify my biases, especially as I tend to hang around very like-minded people. That said, I have sometimes in hindsight managed to see that views I formerly held were the product of lazy inherited thinking or of no thinking at all. For instance, I had (and still have) retributive emotions that prompted me to feel satisfaction when the guilty got their comeuppance. I uncritically accepted some version of retributivism as a good justification for punishment. Then I actually sat down and thought about how to defend it, and ended up writing a couple of articles in the 90s designed to undermine retributivism. But this is far from standard operating procedure for me. As I indicated earlier, I’m not an especially introspective person, and one of the upshots is that unless someone calls me out on them, my biases are likely to elude my detection.

See any good movies, tv shows, lately? Read any good books? What are you listening to?

Babylon Berlin was quite something. You can stay in Germany and get even more depressed by watching Deutschland 83. I didn’t exactly enjoy them but they are terrific. As for books: I just re-read Sense and Sensibility and, aside from its pat and hasty ending, was loving it the entire time. I loved Demon Copperhead and then re-read David Copperfield and must say I liked the newer version better. Do you read Trollope? Everyone should. Much more psychologically nuanced than Dickens (though nothing Trollope wrote is remotely as funny as The Pickwick Papers, which would triumph in almost any cage match for funniest Victorian novel). If you, like me, thought it impossible to become invested in whether someone is appointed to a low-level Anglican curacy in rural England, think again and have a go at The Warden. Then you’ll want to read the rest of the Barsetshire novels. Diana Athill’s memoir “Somewhere Towards the End” was absolutely delightful. For two gonzo reads that are summer perfection: Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper, and Aidan Truhen, The Price You Pay.

I listen to a lot of things, very little of it new. Mostly rock, jazz, and classical. Not much pop or folk and if a banjo is involved please escort me out of hearing range, although as with almost every rule there are exceptions, like The Audreys’ perfect album When the Flood Comes. I often have a playlist running through my head and, when I don’t, I have the Sonos speakers on at home. The tracks range from Rickie Lee Jones to Lucinda Williams to Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, Haydn string quartets, classic funk, Joan Armitrading, Arcade Fire, Peter Gabriel, Vivaldi cello sonatas, James Brown, Samara Joy, Mozart piano concertos. You didn’t ask, but the best concert I went to recently? Lakecia Benjamin, who (together with her killer band) blew the roof off the concert hall.

Favorite philosopher of all time?

W.D. Ross. He got so many things right, and the ratio of insights per page is incredibly high.

Most impressive living philosopher, in your estimation?

Why, that’s easy—Martha Nussbaum! In this case I don’t think it’s my biases at play. Her range is super-human. She is extraordinarily well-read, not just in the history of philosophy but so far beyond that. She writes elegantly and tackles real-life problems. She pens agenda-setting books that convey a grounded, humane, liberal outlook that beautifully defends common sense where appropriate and challenges it when called for.

Living philosopher you most deeply disagree with yet still deeply respect? Why the respect?

So many to choose from…well, how about Mark Schroeder. I actually agree with him about many things, but his naturalistic bent and his influential take on reasons is something we’re quite far apart on. Why the respect? He’s a deep thinker, very wide-ranging, original, open-minded, and also very dedicated to doing well by his students and the profession.

Good or bad for philosophy? Facebook. Twitter.

Dunno. I’ve never been on either.

Last meal?

Hopefully some years away. And ending with my wife’s chocolate mousse pie.

You can ask an omniscient one question, and you will get an honest, direct answer. What is the question?

How’d you get so smart?

Thanks Russ! It’s been fun.

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]