David O'Brien

Prof. O’Brien specializes in the philosophy of education, with a focus on understanding how the values of liberty, equality, and community bear on educational justice. His other areas of expertise are normative ethics and political philosophy, with a focus on understanding the moral significance of distributive inequality. In both areas of research, he is particularly interested in understanding and assessing telic egalitarianism—i.e., the view that it is sometimes non-instrumentally bad if there is inequality in how well different lives go.

Prof. O’Brien’s recent publications include: ‘Equal Opportunity and Higher Education’ (Springer Handbook of Equal Opportunity 2023), ‘Fairness, Care, and Abortion’ (Journal of Applied Philosophy 2023), ‘Egalitarian Machine Learning’ (with Clinton Castro and Ben Schwan, Res Publica 2023), ‘Children, Partiality, and Equality’ (Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2022), ‘How Far Can Political Liberalism Support Reforms in Higher Education’ (Social Theory & Practice 2022), ‘Conservatism Reconsidered’ (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2021), ‘Inequality: Do Not Disperse’ (Utilitas 2020), ‘The Unit and Currency of Egalitarian Concern’ (Journal of Moral Philosophy 2019), ‘Egalitarian Nonconsequentialism and the Levelling Down Objection’ (Ratio 2018), and ‘Inequality of Opportunity: Some Lessons from the Case of Highly Selective Universities’ (Theory and Research in Education 2017).

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/davidobrien/home

Educational Policy Studies website: https://eps.education.wisc.edu/fac-staff/obrien-david/