Professor Hillel Steiner FBA

Hillel Steiner is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999. A Canadian, he originally came to Britain to do his PhD here and has been on the faculty at Manchester ever since. The main focus of Hillel’s teaching and publications is contemporary philosophical work on freedom, rights and social justice. His major work is An Essay on Rights which won the Political Studies Association’s best book prize for 1994 and which advances a theory of distributive justice that has come to be known as left-libertarianism. He has held awards from the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust, and has delivered numerous lectures on his research at universities and conferences in Britain and abroad. His organisational memberships include ones in the American Philosophical Association, Aristotelian Society, Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, European Society for the History of Economic Thought, Political Studies Association, Society for Applied Philosophy, and the September Group.

Within the broad framework of political philosophy, Hillel’s research is concerned with the conceptual analysis of freedom and rights, with the implications of those analyses for aspects of global, genetic and intergenerational justice, and with the relation between moral and economic rationality.

An analytical and historical study of the idea of ‘The Just Price’, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.

Hillel is currently supervising doctoral theses on cosmopolitanism, the obligation to share and conservatism and radicalism. His previous supervisions have included theses on luck egalitarianism, humanitarian intervention, liberalism and public education, libertarianism, the specification of human rights, freedom and manipulation, the nature of power, the concept of self-ownership, public justification, procedural justice, exploitation, environmental constraints and Marxism, property rights, the political theory of Thomas Paine, racial discrimination, and political subjectivity.

Publications Database

Key publications include:

• An Essay on Rights, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming)
• A Debate over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries, with M. Kramer & N. Simmonds, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
• The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings, editor with P. Vallentyne, (London & New York: Palgrave, 2000)
• Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, editor with P. Vallentyne, (London & New York: Palgrave, 2000)
• 'Persons of Lesser Value: Moral Argument and the "Final Solution"', Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12 (1995), 129-141
• 'Choice and Circumstance', Ratio, X (1997), 296-312
• 'Just Taxation and International Redistribution', Nomos XLI: Global Justice, (eds.) I. Shapiro & L. Brilmayer, (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 171-191
• 'Silver Spoons and Golden Genes: Talent Differentials and Distributive Justice', in The Genetic Revolution and Human Rights: 1998 Oxford Amnesty Lectures, (ed.) J. Burley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
  
• ‘Self-Ownership and Conscription’, in The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen, (ed.) Christine Sypnowich, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

• ‘Exploitation Takes Time’, in Essays for Ian Steedman, (eds.) P.A. Samuelson & J. Vint, (Routledge, 2008 forthcoming)

Expertise: issues surrounding distributive justice
Contact: email