Barrett Emerick

I'm an associate professor of philosophy at St. Mary's College of Maryland and chair of the Department of Philosophy.  I'm also affiliated faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and the Environmental Studies program. I work in social philosophy, normative ethics, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology.  I am coeditor (with Ami Harbin) of the American Philosophical Association's Studies on Feminism and Philosophy and am president of the North American Society for Social Philosophy. 

Throughout my work I aim to engage with the world as it is, starting from a place of imperfection and thinking about how we can work to make it better. Grounded in Jean Harvey’s recognition that moral agents are “fellow travelers” who are living “lives of moral endeavor,” my work explores how we are to meet people where they are and find ways to hold them accountable while not writing them off or throwing them away. I start all of my work from the position that human agents are fragile, fallible, and fundamentally social beings. Political arrangements, social structures, and public policies should all be designed accordingly. That's the position from which Audrey Yap and I wrote Not Giving Up on People: A Feminist Case for Prison Abolition. You can read more about it (and get a discount code) here. You can read more about the rest of my research (and find links to download most of my work) here.