Professor Brad Hooker | University of Reading
Brad Hooker was awarded a doctorate at Oxford in 1986. His supervisors were Derek Parfit and James Griffin. Hooker worked at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1986-1993 and at University of Reading until 2019.
He is best known for his development of rule-consequentialism, his arguments on the relation of virtue to well-being, his discussion of moral particularism, and his papers on impartiality and demandingness. He is currently writing a book on fairness.
Title | 'A General Theory of Fairness'
Abstract:
A hypothesis is that fair treatment of people consists in treatment that is sensitive to the relevant differences between people and insensitive to irrelevant differences between them.
An obvious question about this hypothesis is about the relevant or irrelevant differences. Presumably all differences relevant to fairness are morally relevant, since fairness is a component of morality. But are there any differences between people that are morally relevant but not relevant to fairness?
Furthermore, is fairness confined to contexts in which the treatment of some people is compared to the treatment of other people? In other words, is fairness limited to comparative contexts?