Peter A. French

In 2006 Gettysburg College awarded French a Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degree for his work in philosophy and ethics. The citation read at the college’s 171st Commencement by then Gettysburg College President Katherine Will included the following: “Your book exploring the My Lai Massacre attracted national attention for its exploration of the question of whether army units or individual members of those units are responsible for military atrocities and is widely credited as a founding work of the field of applied ethics.” In 2008 the American Philosophical Association dedicated an issue of its Newsletter on Philosophy and Law to French because of his “influence in applied ethics and having helped establish the field of applied ethics as a substantive area of research in the philosophy discipline.” In 2014 the American Philosophical Association dedicated a Symposium Session on the Work of Peter French at its Central Division Meetings in Chicago.

French has been a professor of philosophy at Northern Arizona University, the University of Minnesota, and a visiting professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. He has held the Exxon Distinguished Research Professorship in the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware, the Lennox Distinguished Professorship and Chair of Philosophy at Trinity University, and the Cole Chair in Ethics, Director of the Ethics Center, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is now Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Arizona State University where he served as the Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy, and was the founding Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics from 2000 to 2013.

French is the author of twenty-one books on a wide range of topics in ethics, metaethics and applied ethics. A number of his papers are translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, French, Serbian, and Spanish. He was the editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy for 16 years (1988-2005) and general editor of the seven volume Issues in Contemporary Ethics series in the 1970s. According to Zachary Goldberg, professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, French’s contributions to a wide spectrum of philosophical discussions made him an influential figure in the areas of moral responsibility and the agency of individuals and collectives.

French also coined the term “the responsibility barter game” to describe the common way people negotiate with each other to try to lessen or avoid personal responsibility for bad outcomes. According to Jane E. Jadlos writing in The Journal of Religion for French “responsibility is not a truth of some sort about the world, but a set of practices used to describe and understand individual and social behavior.” French has also written on moral assessment, evil, loss of innocence, blame, shame, vengeance, moral originality, and moral belief/behavior discordance. and he is a founding and senior editor of Midwest Studies in Philosophy, an annual series since 1976 in analytic philosophy.

Peter A. French (born March 19, 1942) is an American philosopher and writer. He is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Arizona State University where he taught from 2000 until 2016. He previously was a professor at Northern Arizona University, University of Minnesota, Dalhousie University, Trinity University, and the University of South Florida.

French was born in 1942 in Newburgh, New York. His father was a Lutheran minister, his mother died of cancer when he was five years old. He was raised in New York and New England and earned a BA (with majors in philosophy and religious studies) from Gettysburg College (1963), an MA in philosophy from the University of Southern California (1964) and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Miami (1971). He did post-doctoral work at Oxford University.