Jason Brennan
Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor
Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at the McDonough School of Business. He specializes in political philosophy and applied ethics. He is the author of fourteen books, including Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Education, with Phil Magness (Oxford University Press, 2019), When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton University Press, 2018), In Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global Poverty, with Bas van der Vossen (Oxford University Press, 2018), Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016), and, with Peter Jaworski, Markets without Limits (Routledge Press, 2016). He also is co-editor, along with David Schmidtz and Bas Van der Vossen, of the Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (2017). He edits the “Political Philosophy for the Real World” series for Routledge Press. As of February 2019, he has five books under contract.
With GISME, Jason designed The Ethics Project, a semester-long project for students to “thinking of something good, and do it.” As a graded assignment in their ethics courses, Georgetown students must explain what they decided to do with their funding (if they chose to take it at all), why they thought it was worth doing, and demonstrate that they actually added value to the world. They must describe the problems they ran into along the way, how they resolved those problems, and what they learned from the project. The Ethics Project requires students think and act like entrepreneurs, and to bear the responsibility for their decisions. The Ethics Project presents students with real-world challenges and real-world consequences of their own making. Jason is also a lecturer at GISME’s annual Workshop on Teaching Professional Business Ethics.