An American by birth and Hoosier by upbringing, Bob Goodin took his D.Phil. in Politics at Oxford in 1975. He spent a decade teaching government at the University of Essex before moving in 1989 to the Australian National University, where he is Distinguished Professor jointly of Philosophy and of Social & Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences. A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Goodin gave the Dewey Lecture on Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago Law School in 2008 and the Edmund Burke lecture at Trinity College, Dublin in 2009. His coauthored book Discretionary Time won the 2009 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research, awarded by the International Social Science Council.

Goodin is founding Editor of The Journal of Political Philosophy, having previously served as Co-editor of the British Journal of Political Science and, for over a decade, as an Associate Editor of Ethics. He was General Editor of the 11-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science for Oxford University Press; he himself co-edited two volumes in that series (Public Policy, with Michael Moran and Martin Rein; Contextual Political Analysis, with Charles Tilly; both 2006) and edited a final one-volume consolidation volume (The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, 2009). Goodin is also founding Editor of a series of books on 'Theories of Institutional Design' for Cambridge University Press and, with James Fishkin, now coedits the Philosophy, Politics & Society series founded by Peter Laslett in 1956. Goodin's other major reference books include:

• A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edn co-edited with Philip Pettit 1993; 2nd edn co-edited with Pettit and Thomas Pogge 2007).
• Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, (Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edn, 2nd edn 2006, both co-edited with Philip Pettit).
• A New Handbook of Political Science, (Oxford UP, 1996, co-edited with Hans-Dieter Klingemann); named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by Choice, the official journal of the American Association of College and Research Libraries.

Goodin's own work focuses on political theory and public policy. His in-print books include:

• Political Theory & Public Policy (U Chicago Press, 1982)
• Protecting the Vulnerable (U Chicago Press, 1985)
• Reasons for Welfare (Princeton U Press, 1988)
• No Smoking: Ethical Issues (U Chicago Press, 1989)
• Motivating Political Morality (Blackwell, 1992)
• Green Political Theory (Polity, 1992)
• Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge U P, 1995)
• Social Welfare as an Individual Responsibility: For and Against, with D. Schmidtz (Cambridge UP, 1998)
• The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, with B. Headey, R. Muffels and H.-J. Dirven (Cambridge UP, 1999)
• Reflective Democracy (Oxford UP, 2003)
• What's Wrong with Terrorism? (Polity, 2006)
• Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, with J.M. Rice, A. Parpo, and L. Eriksson (Cambridge UP, 2008)
• Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory & Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford UP, 2009)

With Geoffrey Brennan, Nic Southwood and Lina Eriksson, Goodin is currently wrapping up a 3-year project on 'Norms, Reasons & Values', funded by the Australian Research Council. He is Senior Research Fellow in Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, Washington, D.C. for 2009-2010.

View Goodin's full CV

Dewey Lecture