About Me
I am Professor
and former Chair of the Department
of
Philosophy at the University
of Colorado, and am currently serving a four-year term as Associate
Dean for Arts and Humanities. My primary area of teaching and
research is
applied ethics, though I also teach courses in ethical theory and the
history of ethics and have published in those areas as well.
Within applied ethics, I have published articles on a variety of
topics, including the moral status of animals, our obligations to
future generations, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, and have
co-edited a
popular
textbook with my friend and colleague Graham Oddie.
I
have also published a
book
on abortion and a
book
on punishment, and have just finished working on a book on applied
ethics and race,
focusing on slave reparations and affirmative action, as well as hate
speech restrictions, hate crime laws and racial profiling. I
graduated summa cum laude
from Yale College in
1986 with a degree in philosophy and history and received my PhD in
philosophy from the University
of
Pittsburgh in 1992. After two years of teaching at Georgetown University
and four years of teaching at Tulane
University, I took up my current position at CU in the fall of
1998.
I grew up in Boulder, where my father, Len Boonin, was also a professor in, and for a time chair of, the Philosophy Department (he retired shortly before I was hired, so the Department was spared the unseemly spectacle of simultaneously rostering dueling Boonins) and my mother, Harriet Boonin, worked and taught in the public schools (where, for a while, Boulder High School was not so lucky and was forced to put up with both of us at the same time). My wife, Leah, is a pre-school teacher and also runs various children's programs for our synagogue. My son, Eli, is finishing up his junior year in high school while my daughter, Sadie, is finishing second grade, and I am spending a good deal of my time these days attempting to come to terms with both of these facts. We also have a cat, All Black, named not just for his color, but in honor of New Zealand's national rugby team (we spent six months living in Christchurch, NZ when I was on sabbatical in 2006, and as a result I now find American football too gentle and bucolic to watch) and our daughter has a guinea pig, Spilly, named for her favorite player on the Colorado Rockies.
When I'm not hard at work as a philosopher or an administrative bureaucrat, I enjoy biking and hiking on local trails, and I also enjoy cross-country skiing and snow-shoeing in the nearby mountains when time and the weather permit. For someone who recently wrote a book arguing that it is morally impermissible for the state to punish people for breaking the law, I also spend an inordinate amount of time enjoying novels about people who get punished by the state for breaking the law (among the best of these are Ed McBain's novels of the 57th Precinct, though my very favorite crime fiction is the series of novels by Richard Stark featuring the amoral thief Parker (sample opening lines: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man." from Firebreak (2001); "Parker put the revolver away and looked out the windshield." from The Sour Lemon Score (1969); "When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed." from The Outfit (September 1963)). If you enjoy crime fiction and have never read Stark (who writes incomprehensibly worse fiction under his real name, Donald Westlake), you owe it to yourself to discover the world of Parker). Occasionally, I even read "serious" fiction, where my favorite authors include J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Michael Chabon and Philip Roth.
I grew up in Boulder, where my father, Len Boonin, was also a professor in, and for a time chair of, the Philosophy Department (he retired shortly before I was hired, so the Department was spared the unseemly spectacle of simultaneously rostering dueling Boonins) and my mother, Harriet Boonin, worked and taught in the public schools (where, for a while, Boulder High School was not so lucky and was forced to put up with both of us at the same time). My wife, Leah, is a pre-school teacher and also runs various children's programs for our synagogue. My son, Eli, is finishing up his junior year in high school while my daughter, Sadie, is finishing second grade, and I am spending a good deal of my time these days attempting to come to terms with both of these facts. We also have a cat, All Black, named not just for his color, but in honor of New Zealand's national rugby team (we spent six months living in Christchurch, NZ when I was on sabbatical in 2006, and as a result I now find American football too gentle and bucolic to watch) and our daughter has a guinea pig, Spilly, named for her favorite player on the Colorado Rockies.
When I'm not hard at work as a philosopher or an administrative bureaucrat, I enjoy biking and hiking on local trails, and I also enjoy cross-country skiing and snow-shoeing in the nearby mountains when time and the weather permit. For someone who recently wrote a book arguing that it is morally impermissible for the state to punish people for breaking the law, I also spend an inordinate amount of time enjoying novels about people who get punished by the state for breaking the law (among the best of these are Ed McBain's novels of the 57th Precinct, though my very favorite crime fiction is the series of novels by Richard Stark featuring the amoral thief Parker (sample opening lines: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man." from Firebreak (2001); "Parker put the revolver away and looked out the windshield." from The Sour Lemon Score (1969); "When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed." from The Outfit (September 1963)). If you enjoy crime fiction and have never read Stark (who writes incomprehensibly worse fiction under his real name, Donald Westlake), you owe it to yourself to discover the world of Parker). Occasionally, I even read "serious" fiction, where my favorite authors include J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Michael Chabon and Philip Roth.