R. Jay Wallace


R. Jay Wallace is a Professor of Philosophy and Judy Chandler Webb Distinguished Chair for Innovative Teaching and Research at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specialization include moral philosophy and philosophy of action. He is most noted for his work on practical reason, moral psychology, and meta-ethics.

Biography

Wallace received his B.A. degree in 1979 from Williams College. He earned the degree of B.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1983. In 1988, he got his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
He has taught at several universities, including: Wesleyan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He has held visiting positions at the Universität Bielefeld, in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. He was the department chair at UC Berkeley from 2005 to 2010. He declined the position of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University in 2013.

Philosophy

In his first major book, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, Wallace defended a view associated with P.F. Strawson according to which attributions of moral praise and blame do not depend on metaphysical claims about freedom of the will but on our moral practices. The philosopher Annette Baier wrote that
“This beautifully organized and lucidly argued book might be taken as a model of how a sustained philosophical argument should proceed. Wallace’s thesis is that our practices of holding persons responsible for their choices and actions, and reacting to those that offend against moral norms with blame, indignation or resentment, make perfectly good sense, even if determinism is true."
His collection of papers, Normativity and the Will, brings together essays mostly written in the decade after the 1996 book Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, which "develop the moral psychology behind his Strawsonian account of moral responsibility as depending on our practices of holding people morally accountable."
His most recent book, The View from Here, was described by Thomas Nagel in the London Review of Books as follows: "This interesting, careful and occasionally outrageous book explores the complex interaction and competition between the attitudes of affirmation and regret that are almost inevitable as we look back on our lives and celebrate or deplore the conditions and choices that have made us what we are – that underlie our successes and failures, and our personal attachments."

Selected publications

Books