Henry S. Richardson earned graduate degrees in law and in public policy at Harvard before getting his Ph.D. there (under John Rawls) in 1986. Dr. Richardson’s work centers on practical reasoning in all of its many guises: in the reasoning of individuals about their aims, in the democratic reasoning of citizens about public policy, and in our moral reasoning. Dr. Richardson’s initial work concerned the nature of individual reasoning. His book, Practical Reasoning About Final Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1994), shows how it is possible for individuals to deliberate rationally about ends, even final or ultimate ends, establishing new ones through a process of reasoning.

Dr. Richardson’s second book, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (Oxford University Press, 2002), argues that democratic legitimacy requires that we rule one another by reasoning with each other, and developed an institutionally concrete account of how this can occur. This book is the subject of a forthcoming symposium in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, with contributions by Philip Pettit, David Estlund, and Thomas Christiano.

While Dr. Richardson continues to work on practical reasoning in general and on political theory, the bulk of his current work concerns moral reasoning. His overall aim is to work out how moral theory can best absorb the lessons of American pragmatism without giving up the constructive role of theory. He first set out these general thoughts, in a programmatic way, in "Beyond Good and Right: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism," Philosophy & Public Affairs 24 (1995): 108-141. This piece drew on "Specifying Norms as a Way to Resolve Concrete Ethical Problems," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (1990): 279-310; reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual, Vol. XIII. The pragmatist’s emphasis on the intelligent response to obstacles suggests the need sometimes to re-specify moral norms; but who is authorized to do so? “Institutionally Divided Moral Responsibility,” in Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (1999): 218-249, develops the general view that this authorization varies with one’s social role. Dr. Richardson is currently at work on a book, tentatively entitled Articulating the Moral Community, that develops and deepends these lines of thought.

In addition to this theoretical work, Dr. Richardson has worked on an important but neglected issue in medical research, the question of what obligations medical researchers have to provide care that their research subjects need, but that is not required to carry out their research studies soundly or safely. Dr. Richardson began this work while he was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Clinical Bioethics at NIH in 2002-3 and has published on the topic in the British Medical Journal and the American Journal of Public Health. He is also at work on a short book on the topic.

In political theory apart from the nature of democratic deliberation, Dr. Richardson’s work has been mainly as an editor and expositor. He is a coeditor (with Gerald Mara and R. B. Douglass) of Liberalism and the Good (Routledge, 1990) and (with Paul J. Weithman) of The Philosophy of Rawls (5 Volumes, Garland Press, 1999).

Dr. Richardson has held research fellowships sponsored by Georgetown University, the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dr. Richardson is the editor of Ethics and is the Editor at Large of the Human Development and Capability Association.

Dr. Richardson is married to Mary E. Challinor and has two children. Though generally he prefers the later Wittgenstein to the earlier, in his leisure time he is more drawn to the Tractarian ideal of frictionless gliding along sharp edges, which, in the actual world, only ice skating adequately approximates.