TOM KIRKPATRICK

I'm Tom Kirkpatrick, a PhD candidate in the Philosophy department at the University of California, San Diego. I plan to defend my dissertation, United by Nature: A Natural Rights Liberal Egalitarian Theory of Justice, in the spring of 2022.

My research interests are in moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on distributive justice. I focus on questions about how to interpret, justify, and reconcile the ideals of liberty and equality in this area. My central project is to give an account of justice which answers these questions by drawing on ideas from the natural rights tradition. I present and defend a theory which affirms both strong private ownership rights as well as rights to equal shares of resources.

I also have interests in the history of philosophy, and especially in the political thought of natural rights theorists like Locke and Kant. In my research, I often deal with areas connected to the philosophy of law, such as the nature of rights and ownership.