Dr Bob Brecher

Dr Brecher's research interests span meta-ethics, applied ethics and the interface between the two, with particular interests in issues of moral responsibility, including that of academics, health and medical ethics and the moral analysis of political realities, most centrally the contemporary debate on the morality of torture and of its suggested legalisation.

Published in 1998, his Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality (Routledge) constitutes the ‘negative’ part of his objections to much of the moral philosophy of the empirico-liberal tradition and continues to inform the ‘positive’ analysis of his ongoing project provisionally entitled ‘A Justification of Morality’, in which he argue for a close connection between reason and morality, between knowing and doing. An initial argument is offered in ‘Moral Obligation and Everyday Advice’, South African Journal of Philosophy (2005). Brecher's concerns in applied ethics are best represented in his recent Torture and the Ticking Bomb (Blackwell, 2007), as well as in a number of recent journal articles focussing on aspects of responsibility as reflected in particular in medical and educational practice.