Alyssa Bernstein (2007-2008)

Alyssa Bernstein was awarded the first Nancy Schaenen Visiting Scholar Sabbatical Year Fellowship Award for Residency at the Prindle Institute for Ethics.

While at DePauw Alyssa Bernstein wrote a book on contemporary philosophical conceptions of human rights, focusing on John Rawls’ Law of Peoples and its main competitors, of which the most influential is “the capabilities approach” introduced by Amartya Sen and further developed by Martha Nussbaum. In recent publications Bernstein has addressed the following topics, among others: the philosophical justification of universal human rights; the moral basis of a just system of international law; the grounds and limits of state sovereignty; the justifiability of humanitarian military intervention; and the implications of globalization and state disaggregation for the contractualist conception of universal human rights presented by John Rawls in his book, The Law of Peoples (1999). She is currently working on an account of the relation between Rawls’ Law of Peoples and Kant’s philosophy of international law, as well as a critical examination of the non-contractualist conception of universal human rights developed by Martha Nussbaum and presented in her book, Frontiers of Justice (2006).

Currently an assistant professor at Ohio University in its Department of Philosophy, Alyssa Bernstein previously was a Fellow of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Her main areas of research and writing are human rights, global justice, social contract theory (contractarianism and contractualism) and Kant’s ethics and political philosophy.

Bernstein has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University, received in the year 2000. Prior to attending Harvard she spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Jerusalem studying Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. At Harvard she held a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and was a Graduate Fellow at the Harvard Center for Ethics. She studied ethics and meta-ethics (relativism and objectivity) with T.M. Scanlon, Hilary Putnam, and Christine Korsgaard, and political philosophy with Rawls. She worked with Rawls for a number of years as one of his research and teaching assistants as well as his dissertation advisee.