Biography
Michael Moehler is Founding Director and Core Faculty member of the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Virginia Tech. His research interests lie in central areas of moral and political philosophy, with a focus on the social contract tradition and some of its key figures, such as Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Rawls. Dr. Moehler has research and teaching expertise in the history of moral and political philosophy, rational choice theory, public reason theory, distributive justice, the welfare state, political economy, and interdisciplinary topics in philosophy, politics, and economics. He is author of Minimal Morality: A Multilevel Social Contract Theory (Oxford University Press) and Contractarianism (Cambridge University Press).
Publications
- “The Scope of Instrumental Morality,” Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
- “Contractarian ethics and Harsanyi’s two justifications of utilitarianism,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 12 (2013): 24-47
- “A Hobbesian derivation of the principle of universalization,” Philosophical Studies, 158 (2012): 83-107
- “The (Stabilized) Nash Bargaining Solution as a Principle of Distributive Justice,” Utilitas, 22 (2010), 447- 473.
- “Neoclassical Economics,” Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir, co-authored with Geoffrey Brennan, (SAGE Publications, 2010), Volume II, pp. 946-951.
- “Justice and Peaceful Cooperation,” Journal of Global Ethics, 5 (2009), 195 – 214.
- “Why Hobbes’ State of Nature is Best Modeled by an Assurance Game,” Utilitas, 21 (2009), pp. 297-326.