David McNaughton is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, and at Keele University in England. He did his undergraduate work at Newcastle University and his graduate work at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Moral Vision (Blackwell, 1988) and, with Eve Garrard, of Forgiveness (Acumen Publishing, 2010), and of a number of papers and chapters on moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He and Piers Rawling have collaborated on a large number of articles on agent-relativity, consequentialism and deontology, practical reasons, and moral metaphysics, and are currently writing a book on those topics. He has also collaborated with Eve Garrard on a series of papers on some virtues and vices that have occupied an important place in Judeo-Christian thought: especially forgiveness, humility, evil, and hypocrisy. They are concerned, among other things, with what sense can be made of these concepts in a secular context. He is editor of Joseph Butler’s Fifteen Sermons and Other Writings in Ethics (OUP, 2017) and Butler’s Analogy of Religion (OUP, 2022), to be followed by a book on Butler’s work. He is also writing A Short History of Western Ethics for Polity Press.

He founded the British Society for Ethical Theory in 1996 and was its first President. He has also been President of the Florida Philosophical Association.

He retired in May 2017 and he and his wife, Rosa, and their two dogs, Molly and Bella, moved to Melrose in the Scottish Borders. Lovely though Melrose is, the lure of the ‘Athens of the North’ was too great, and they now live in Edinburgh. He is currently Honorary Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Edinburgh University.