David Enoch (; born 1971) is an Israeli ethicist and philosopher of law with research interests in moral, political and legal philosophy within the analytic tradition. He is the co-director of the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy and has been the Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2005. He is Professor of the Philosophy of Law at the University of Oxford. He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and Bachelor of Laws degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He then completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University in 2003.
Enoch is a member of the Israeli Law Professors' Forum for Democracy, established in 2023 to analyze and address of the various reforms proposed by Israel’s 37th Government to change Israel’s democratic regime.
Philosophy
In metaethics, Enoch defends "robust realism", the view according to which there are objective, universal, non-natural moral truths, truths that when successful in our moral inquiries we discover rather than create, that do not constitutively depend on us and our dispositions. He uses two positive arguments for robust realism: one from the impartiality of morality and the other from the deliberative indispensability of moral truths.Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford University Press, 2011)
In political philosophy, Enoch criticizes Rawlsian versions of liberalism,Against Public Reason”, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 1 (2015), 112-142 and is developing a non-Rawlsian liberalism, that is sensitive to the concerns of the real world,“Against Utopianism: Noncompliance and Multiple Agents”, Philosopher’s Imprint 18 (2018) and that attempts to incorporate the insights of liberalism’s critics.“False Consciousness for Liberals, Part I: Consent, Autonomy, and Adaptive Preferences”, The Philosophical Review 129 (2020), 159-210
In legal philosophy, Enoch criticizes common ways of doing general jurisprudence,“Is General Jurisprudence Interesting?” in Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence (edited by David Plunkett, Scott Shapiro, and Kevin Toh) (Oxford University Press, 2019). and works on specific normative questions concerning the law, for instance, when it comes to moral and legal luck,“Luck between Morality, Law and Justice”, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9 (2008), 23-59; “Moral Luck and the Law”, Philosophy Compass 5 (2010), 42-54. or to the status of statistical evidence.“Statistical Evidence, Sensitivity, and the Legal Value of Knowledge” (with Levi Spectre and Talia Fisher), Philosophy and Public Affairs 40 (2012), 197-224David Enoch, “Sense and Sensitivity” (with Talia Fisher), Stanford Law Review 67 (2015), 557-611
In ethics, Enoch defends moral deference,“A Defense of Moral Deference”, The Journal of Philosophy 111 (2014), 1-30. and the views that consent should be understood contrastively,“Contrastive Consent and Third-Party Coercion”. Forthcoming in Philosopher’s Imprint. that a distinction within the value of autonomy helps to clarify the status of hypothetical consent,“Hypothetical Consent and the Value(s) of Autonomy”, Ethics 128 (2017), 6-36. and that the intending-foreseeing distinction is suspicious – especially when applied to state action.“Intending, Foreseeing, and the State”, Legal Theory 13 (2007), 69-99.
Bibliography
Reviews of Taking Morality Seriously:
Freely accessible version (PDF).
References
External links David Enoch, "If you Want to Support Israel, Boycott its New Government", Forward, 31 July 2023.
David Enoch's website