Leif Wenar
· ▪ Faculty Director, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society ▪ Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and, by courtesy, Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law ▪ Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment ▪ Honors Program AdvisorStanford University · Philosophy of Education
Active 1992–2025
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About
Leif Wenar is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, with courtesy appointments as Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law. He received his AB in Philosophy from Stanford and earned his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard. After working in Britain, he returned to Stanford's Department of Philosophy in September 2020. His research focuses on developing unity theory, a new approach to understanding what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. Wenar is the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World, as well as the author-meets-critics volume Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. He has contributed entries on John Rawls and Rights to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and has published articles in numerous academic journals including Mind, Analysis, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Columbia Law Review, and The Philosopher’s Annual. Wenar has also co-edited works on economist F. A. Hayek and on philanthropy ethics. His professional experience includes visiting professorships at Stanford’s Center on Ethics and Society, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, and the Australian National University School of Philosophy, among others. His public writing has been featured in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. Additionally, he served on the…
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Political Science
- Mathematics
- Psychology
- Aesthetics
- Social psychology
- Law
Selected publications
Property Rights and the Resource Curse
2017-05-15 · 20 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter suggests that the damaging flow of money can be stopped by enforcing property rules against the middlemen who channel consumer spending into resource-cursed countries: against the international resource corporations, and against the foreign governments that deal with the worst regimes. The property-based approach here would only add that American energy companies should be barred from trading with the Sudanese government specifically because this regime is violating the human rights…
Why Rawls is Not a Cosmopolitan Egalitarian
2017-07-05 · 7 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter begins with a brief review of John Rawls's theory of justice for a single country and the cosmopolitan theories that developed out of it. It summarizes Rawls's law of peoples and some of his puzzling statements about its justification. The chapter explains why Rawls's fundamental norm of legitimacy rules out cosmopolitanism, and how Rawls's conception of a people led him to reject international egalitarianism. It suggests that Rawls's morality of states may be more plausible than is…
The American Journal of Bioethics · 2025-01-29 · 2 citations
letterOpen accessPhilosophy & Public Affairs · 2023 · 2 citations
1st authorCorrespondingTwo debates over value are nearly coeval with philosophy itself. One debate is over what is good for its own sake (intrinsically good), the other is over what contributes to an individual's welfare (“what would make this person's life go, for him, as well as possible”).1 These two debates, over “the good” and “the good-for,” are distinct, yet they have been parallel both in their leading theories and their main objections. Historically, the leading theories in both debates have been hedonist, de…
Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 2 citations
Senior authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 139 shared
Thomas Pogge
- 135 shared
John Broome
Baidu (China)
- 135 shared
Andrew Williams
Baidu (China)
- 135 shared
Matt Matravers
- 135 shared
Adam Swift
Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy
- 135 shared
Susan Neiman
Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy
- 135 shared
Michael Schefczyk
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- 135 shared
Duncan Ivison
Walter de Gruyter (Germany)
Education
B.A., Philosophy
Stanford University
Ph.D., Philosophy
Harvard University
Awards & honors
- William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philos…
- Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton’s University Cen…
- Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral…
- Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at th…
- Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs a…
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