Research degrees
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Political and Legal Philosophy
Political and legal philosophy group members
Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott’s work spans across political and legal philosophy. It engages with fundamental normative questions about what justice requires, and with questions about what role the law plays in shaping our rights. Her main research focus is on ownership rights, including conceptions of self-ownership. Her work interrogates the role that conceptions of ownership play in political theorizing, especially in the liberal and libertarian traditions. She engages with normative questions about the justification of systems of ownership, and what shape those systems ought to take. She also addresses questions about the scope of ownership rights, including whether or not the rights we have with respect to ourselves and our bodies should be thought of in terms of self-ownership. Much of her work tries to make sense of the connections between the rights we have with respect to ourselves, our things, our intellectual and creative output, and our personal data. On the topic of bodily rights in particular, her work engages with debates in feminist philosophy around objectification, commodification, and the commercialisation of bodily services.
She has written on topics including cultural appropriation; personal data and data protection measures; the moral rights of authors; the normative status and regulation of consent; privacy; and self-ownership. She is currently working on a broader project investigating the nature of the commitment to ownership rights within liberalism.
James Clarke’s research interests are in post-Kantian moral, legal, and political philosophy and Critical Theory. He is especially interested in the ways in which the post-Kantians anticipate and provide insight into central themes and issues within Critical Theory. From 2017-2019, he was primary investigator on the AHRC international research network “Reason, Right, and Revolution: Practical Philosophy between Kant and Hegel”, which explored the practical philosophy of neglected post-Kantian philosophers He has written several papers on Fichte’s and Hegel’s philosophy of right and is the editor, with Gabriel Gottlieb, of Practical Philosophy from Kant to Hegel: Freedom, Right, and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). His current research is focused on Johann Benjamin Erhard's natural law theory and his defence of the right to revolution. He is translating (with Mike Nance) Erhard's writings on revolution for the BSHP/OUP series New Texts in the History of Philosophy.
Giacomo Floris’s research lies in moral and political philosophy. In moral philosophy, his work has focused primarily on questions of moral status and basic equality, including what it means to have equal moral status, what (if anything) justifies persons’ status as equals, and who should be included in the community of equals. In political philosophy, his research investigates what a relational egalitarian society owes to its most vulnerable and marginalised members, such as people experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance use disorders and mental illness, and sex workers.
He is the co-editor of How Can We Be Equals? (Oxford University Press, 2024), and his work has been published in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Politics, Philosophy & Economics, among others.
Martin O’Neill works on various topics at the intersection of political philosophy, political economy and public policy. He is especially interested in the theory and practice of social and economic justice, and in recent years his research has combined more theoretical work with a more practical engagement with concrete policy proposals, often working together with foundations, NGOs and think tanks.
As an example of that more applied work, Martin has in recent years been working (together with Joe Guinan, President of the Democracy Collaborative "think-and-do tank") on ideas of 'community wealth building' as a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic approach to local economic development. Their ideas have been taken up by local authorities and other institutions in a number of different parts of the world. Their book The Case for Community Wealth Building (Polity Press, 2020) has recently been translated into Polish, and its ideas are being put into practice in a number of Polish cities. (Martin is also (2025-6) a member of the Community Wealth Building Commission that has been set up by David Skaith, Mayor of the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority.)
Other areas of research that Martin has been working on in recent years include a number of collaborations, including: with Jan Kandiyali (Durham) on the relationship between liberalism and socialism; with Angus Hebenton (Nottingham) on the 'real worlds of economic planning'; and with Markus Furendal (Stockholm) on the political and economic ideas of Rudolf Meidner. Other topics on which Martin has written in recent years include the case for lowering the voting age and the democratic inclusion of teenage citizens; arguments for public provision and against privatization; ideas of predistribution; and the ideas on social justice of the economist Thomas Piketty. Together with Pablo Gilabert (Concordia) he is co-author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on 'Socialism', and he is also one of four co-authors of the SEP entry on 'Philosophy of Money and Finance'.
Christian Piller works in the fields of moral and political philosophy. His most recent research spans these two fields by focusing on well-being, a notion that is central to moral as well as political discourse. The philosophical literature centres on the “Big Four” options: hedonism, desire-satisfaction accounts, objective list theories, and perfectionism. However, Christian argues that beyond understanding what makes something good or bad for a person, there is the further issue of how all the things that are good or bad for one determine one’s well-being. The literature lacks an account that aggregates these goodness-for and badness-for facts to an overall state, the state of well-being. This research develops a scepticism that there is such an account. Following the lead of Thomas Scanlon Jr, Piller also doubts that there is any need for such an aggregative theory: people usually care about other things besides their own well-being. To reflect this fact, a person’s own deliberation will need to go beyond what a theory of well-being could possibly deliver.
Alan Thomas’s research spans both moral philosophy and political philosophy. In political philosophy his primary interest is in an asset focused form of egalitarianism represented, paradigmatically, by the idea of a property-owning democracy. Given this focus on asset holding his recent research also extends to justice in finance. His overall research project is to defend a pre-distributive, asset based, egalitarianism that combines themes from Rawls, Keynes, Henry George and the post-Keynesian tradition into an overall systematic vision. He is the co-author, with Bart Engelen and Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) of a recent study in political psychology, Extravagance and Misery, which incorporates inter-disciplinary work on the New Science of Happiness into its account of the emotional regimes of market societies. His research has been funded by the Sir John Templeton Foundation and the Independent Social Research Foundation. His most recent paper, co-authored with Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott, is on ‘Nozick’s Socialism’.
