Visiting Faculty Fellow, 2008-09 | Department of Philosophy

Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary.

Professor McKerlie is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. His writing is focused on ancient philosophy and contemporary moral and political philosophy. Currently he is working on the subject of justice between age-groups, or justice between the young and the old. He criticizes the view (endorsed by Norman Daniels and Ronald Dworkin) that we can determine what the young owe to the elderly by taking as our model a hypothetical prudential choice made by one person about distribution over the different temporal stages in his own life. The positive view that he defends is egalitarian. However, he also rejects the view of most egalitarian writers (for example, John Rawls and Thomas Nagel) that justice is satisfied as long as peoples’ lives considered as a whole are made equal. His view claims that the key to understanding justice between the young and the old is the application of egalitarian values, the value of equality itself, or the value of egalitarian priority, to temporal parts of lives rather than to complete lifetimes. Such a view has very different implications for the institution of social security and the provision of health care to the elderly than a utilitarian view, an egalitarian view that is only concerned with lifetimes, or a constructivist view that relies on a hypothetical prudential choice. His project for the fellowship year is to complete a book manuscript explaining and defending this approach to justice between age-groups.

He has published articles in Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Utilitas, and Economics and Philosophy. He is the author of “Justice and the Elderly” in The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics, ed.by Bonnie Steinbock.

He received his M.A. from the University of Calgary and a D. Phil. from Oxford. He has been an Executive Editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and a member of the Editorial Board of Ethics.