Faculty

Jon Garthoff
Assistant Professor
Email: garthoff@northwestern.edu

Jon Garthoff's (Ph.D. UCLA, 2004) primary philosophical interests lie in ethical theory and political philosophy, including especially the Kantian traditions within these disciplines. He is also interested in a variety of metaphysical topics, such as personal identity and freedom of the will. His publications include "Zarathustra's Dilemma and the Embodiment of Morality" (Philosophical Studies 117:2, 2004), which won the Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2003 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. He has been the recipient of a Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship, and previous national fellowship awards that include the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the George Mason University Institute for Humane Studies Graduate Fellowship.


Writings and Recently Taught Courses

Publications

• "The Embodiment Thesis", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7:1, 2004. An abstract sketch of a novel moral role that social institutions must play by specifying and mediating individuals' moral obligations and entitlements.
  
• "Zarathustra's Dilemma and the Embodiment of Morality", Philosophical Studies 117:2, 2004. An argument that individuals will stand in morally objectionable relations of dependence unless they discharge their obligations of aid collectively by means of a structure of social institutions.

• "The Social Specification of Moral Obligations and Entitlements". An argument that in certain domains individuals' obligations and entitlements are underdetermined by non-social facts and that as a consequence individuals must collectively specify the contents of these moral relations.
• "Structuring Ends". An effort to reconcile the claim that the good of human persons is in large part constituted by their contingent aims with the claim that the good of human of human persons is objective and reason-generating; this effort proceeds by explicating a kind of end that is underemphasized in the literature on practical reason and showing how this kind of end enables us to reconcile the above claims.
• "Collective Agent-Centered Options". An argument against strongly egalitarian moral requirements on the distribution of goods on the grounds that such requirements must be either incompatible with the morally significant exercise of collective autonomy or insufficiently motivated.
• "Philosophical Liberalism". An argument against Rawlsian restrictions on the reasons individuals may appeal to in public political discourse and a qualified defense of a different sort of restriction based not on the burdens of judgment but rather on differences in kind among various putative epistemic justifications.
• "Harms Without States: A Defense of the Possibility of Posthumous Harm". An argument that several influential accounts of the metaphysics of harm are mistaken and that the proper theory of harm will include posthumous harm as an ordinary case.

• CURRENT CV

Recently Taught Courses

• Philosophy 477: Moral Values and Social Institutions (Fall 2004)
• Philosophy 150: Elementary Logic I (Fall 2004)