The 2010 Aquinas Lecture, What is Reparative Justice?, was delivered on Sunday, February 28, 2010, by Margaret Urban Walker. Prof. Walker is Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University.
Prof. Walker received the Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1975, and was a member of the Philosophy Department at Fordham University from 1974-2002. She has taught philosophy and philosophical ethics in undergraduate and graduate programs at several universities. Prof. Walker’s research and teaching fields include Anglo-American moral and political theory, restorative justice and reparations, the history of ethics, feminist ethics, and Wittgenstein. A main theme of her earlier work is the impact of social differences and inequalities on everyday moral thinking and on philosophical ethics. Her most recent book, Moral Repair, examines the ethics and moral psychology of responding to wrongdoing in ways that restore trust and hope, the basis of moral relations. She is currently working on a conception of reparative justice and reparations, as well as on the moral significance of public truth-telling, and other issues related to human rights and post-conflict repair.
Prof. Walker is author of Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (originally published 1998, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2007); Moral Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and most recently Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relation After Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2006). In addition to many articles and book chapters, she has edited or co-edited several collections: Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, with Peggy DesAutels (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); and Naturalized Bioethics: Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice, with Hilde Lindemann and Marian Verkerk (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Prof. Walker has held visiting appointments at the University of South Florida, Washington University, and the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She was honored to be the first woman to hold the Cardinal Mercier Chair in Philosophy for 2001-2 at the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2003-2004, she was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University Center for Human Values. She has worked on projects with the International Center for Transitional Justice on gender and reparations (published in The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies while Redressing Human Rights Violations, ed. Ruth Rubio-Marin, Cambridge University Press, 2009) and on how truth commissions work. In 2007, Margaret Walker was honored to be the first recipient of ASU’s Defining Edge Research in Humanities Award.