Alastair Norcross

Who is Alastair Norcross?

Alastair Norcross is an Associate Professor of philosophy specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy.

In 2007, he transferred to University of Colorado at Boulder from Rice University, where he had been since 2002, after teaching for ten years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he was the Easterwood Associate Professor of Philosophy. Before that, he taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, while finishing his Ph.D. at Syracuse University in 1991. He is a descendant of William Wallace.

In ethics, Norcross defends a version of act utilitarianism known as scalar utilitarianism, which is the theory that there are no right or wrong actions, only better or worse actions ranked along a continuum from the action that contributes most to overall utility to the action that contributes the least.