Jonathan Quong brings expertise in liberalism, public reason, and distributive justice to his scholarship and teaching. He joined USC in 2013 after a decade on the faculty at the University of Manchester, and is committed to showing students that abstract philosophical questions have real stakes in the policy debates that shape everyday life.
Please introduce yourself.
My name is Jonathan Quong. I am Professor of Philosophy (and by courtesy) Law, and I am currently serving as Director of the School of Philosophy.
What is your interpretation of law and philosophy? How would you describe it to someone who didn’t know about this specific niche?
Law and philosophy is a very broad area! Whenever we ask non-empirical questions about legal concepts, legal reasoning, or the nature of law itself, we are almost certainly engaged in at least some philosophical thinking about the law. Put differently, if we are asking conceptual questions about legal concepts or institutions, or if we are asking moral or political questions about the law, we are doing philosophical work about the law.
Can you briefly describe the focus of your research? What gap in existing knowledge do you hope to fill or add to with your scholarship?
I have broad interests in political, moral, and legal philosophy. Among other things, I have written on the nature of liberalism, the idea of public reason, paternalism, the morality of defensive force, distributive justice, and the concept of legitimate injustice. In a very general sense, I am interested in how we ought to organize our shared social, political, and legal institutions so that we can live on fair terms with each other.
Tell us a bit about your motivation for your specialty area and how you arrived at USC.
I started working on questions in political philosophy in graduate school, and never really looked back. I have always been interested in trying to understand questions of political morality, for example; what are the limits of a principle of liberal toleration? Or, are there certain kinds of reasons that cannot justify legitimate laws and policies because the reasons are rooted in controversial ideas about what’s valuable or true? I arrived at USC in 2013 after having spent the first ten years of my career as a faculty member at the University of Manchester in the UK.
What do you hope your students take away from your courses? What would success as a professor look like for you?
First, I encourage students to see why political, moral, and legal philosophy is exciting and worth studying. I show students how more abstract questions in philosophy deeply inform the policy debates that students are more familiar with (e.g. debates over immigration policy, the price of higher education, minimum wage laws).
Second, I want students to appreciate the importance of thinking clearly and analytically about moral and political questions. Some students are inclined to believe that “it’s all a matter of opinion,” and that you can therefore coherently say or believe anything you like. By exposing them to excellent work in political, moral, and legal philosophy, and engaging them in careful debate and discussion, previously skeptical students often come to see that there are better worse arguments about moral and political issues, and that it’s possible to make real progress by thinking hard about complicated questions and looking for inconsistencies in one’s own arguments and the arguments of others.
Third, I aim to help students achieve a deeper understanding of why many philosophical questions are the source of considerable disagreement. There is an understandable tendency, perhaps particularly in normative ethics and political philosophy, for students to see views with which they disagree as obviously false. But once students can see why the view they reject has real merits—why so many others have taken it to be a profoundly attractive answer to some question—they often gain a better appreciation both of the difficulty of the question and a deeper understanding of their own reasons for endorsing a particular view.
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