Foreign thinker
Thomas Hurka
Thomas HurkaMoral Philosophy and PerfectionismCanadianb. 1952
Life and Thought
Thomas Hurka (born 1952) is a Canadian philosopher and the Jackman Distinguished Chair in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto. He is considered one of the most prominent contemporary theorists of moral perfectionism, and his research focuses on value theory, virtue, and the nature of the good life. His major works, including Perfectionism and The Best Things in Life, have had a wide-ranging influence on analytic moral philosophy.
Thomas Hurka was born on August 10, 1952, in Toronto, Canada. Both of his parents were from Czechoslovakia; his mother arrived in London as a Jewish refugee in 1939. After attending the University of Toronto Schools, he earned a BA with honors in philosophy from the University of Toronto (1975) and then a BPhil from Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1977). He received his doctorate in 1980 from the University of Oxford with a dissertation on "Perfectionist Ethics" supervised by R. M. Hare.
Thomas Hurka taught at the University of Calgary from 1978 to 2002 and then joined the University of Toronto, where he holds the Jackman Distinguished Chair in Philosophical Studies. In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
His main areas of work are normative ethics, value theory, and political philosophy. His best-known work is the book Perfectionism (1993), in which he reconstructs perfectionism as a moral theory that identifies the human good with the realization and development of fundamental properties of human nature (such as knowledge, achievement, and virtue). He emphasizes that the good life is formed not by an extreme focus on a single good, but by a balance among pleasure, knowledge, achievement, and virtue.
His other books include Virtue, Vice, and Value (2001), The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters (2011), and works on the ethics of war, games, and a critique of the concept of "good for" or "well-being." Thomas Hurka has also written articles on climate change ethics, arguing that rejecting moral egoism allows us to expand the scope of beings with moral status.
