About

John Hawthorne is a Provost Professor of Philosophy and holds the Linda MacDonald Hilf Chair in Philosophy at USC Dornsife. His academic role involves engaging in philosophical scholarship, and he is associated with the university's broader intellectual community. As a faculty member, he contributes to the university's mission of advancing knowledge and education in the field of philosophy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Physics
• Mathematical economics
• Quantum mechanics
• Mathematics
• Linguistics
• Statistics
• Theoretical physics
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Preface and Acknowledgments

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-05-06

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Pr e fac e a n d Ac k now l e dg m e n ts this monograph explores vari ous aspects of common-sense morality, paying special attention to issues connected to harm.The topics covered are not especially new, though I hope that the chapters are something of an advertisement for what can be achieved by suitable rigor, attention to detail, and sensitivity to connections with other subfields of philosophy.There are certainly themes that link the essays.Obvious examples include the need to understand the ethical significance of causatives and the challenges to integrating common ethical sensibilities into a reasonable normative theory of decision-making.But there is no grand ethical worldview that animates this book.That said, readers will certainly get some sense of pos si ble winners and definite losers in the space of normative ethics.The title was chosen to convey a sense of playfulness.(The subtitle was chosen on the basis of sound marketing advice from the Press.)Whether the philosophical topic at hand is or is not of ethical enormity, and whether or not it concerns big questions about the under lying structure of real ity, I tend to approach it with a certain inner sense of playful mischief.Whether this comes through, even slightly, over the pages that follow, I will leave it to readers to judge.Most of the main ideas were presented over three Hempel lectures at Prince ton in September 2024, though there were obvious limits to how much could be fit into three fifty-minute lectures.At the time the ideas were presented, a significant portion of chapter 1 and about a third of chapter 2 were drafted.The remaining material consisted of a mix of mental and digital notes that were hastily converted into bare-bones handouts.In the year that followed, I worked hard, in the com pany of my collaborators, on turning those ideas into what you see here.These chapters have benefited greatly from critical feedback.Three people deserve special mention.Cian Dorr worked through drafts of each chapter, providing extensive comments that, as usual, were ablaze with insight.Two referees for Prince ton, Jacob Nebel and Brian Hedden, identified themselves to me once their comments were written.In each case the comments were superb, identifying places where the argumentation needed further

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Alignment, AI Risk and Value

  2026-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4 Killing for Burgers. Part 2: Some Absolutist Responses

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-05-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Killing and Other Dastardly Deeds

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-05-06

  book1st authorCorresponding

  A powerful and probing critique of the ethical permissibility of serious harms In Killing and Other Dastardly Deeds , eminent philosopher John Hawthorne rigorously probes the commonsense morality of killing and other serious harms, exposing troubling issues at the foundations of ethical thought. The book addresses the ethical significance of causatives, focusing on the contrast between actions that are killings and those that aren’t killings, but which hasten death. It offers an extensive critique of popular contractualist treatments of the wrongness of harming people. It also investigates the popular absolutist idea that one should never perform an action that will with certainty kill someone when the only upside is an array of trifling goods. Along the way, readers learn just how difficult it is to embed various standard ethical ideas into a sensible normative theory of decision making. Drawing many connections with areas of philosophy beyond ethics, and making important contributions at the intersection of ethics and decision theory, Killing and Other Dastardly Deeds is an insightful critique of absolutist prohibitions on killing.

  PublisherDOI

• 2 Vaccines and Electric Shocks: Contractualists on Harm

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-05-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1 Killing: On the Ethical Significance of Causatives

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-05-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3 Killing for Burgers. Part 1: Challenges for Absolutism

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-05-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legal Causation and Zeno Sequences

  2025-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract After a brief introduction to the causation of events with a partly legal essence, I look at some Benardete-style cases featuring legal properties. These cases require less extravagant departures from ordinary physics than various other examples in the literature. They also raise interesting questions about backwards causation. Along the way, I revisit the ‘Change Principle’ discussed in Hawthorne (2000) and find it wanting.

  PublisherDOI

• AI Survival Stories - Responses to Critics

  PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) · 2025-12-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We thank each of the critics for their thoughtful contributions to this volume. Below, we reply to each contribution in detail.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• AI safety: a climb to Armageddon?

  Philosophical Studies · 2025-03-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before failing - safety efforts have negative expected utility. The paper examines three response strategies: Optimism, Mitigation, and Holism. Each faces challenges stemming from intrinsic features of the AI safety landscape that we term Bottlenecking, the Perfection Barrier, and Equilibrium Fluctuation. The surprising robustness of the argument forces a reexamination of core assumptions around AI safety and points to several avenues for further research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Juhani Yli‐Vakkuri

  48 shared

• Cian Dorr

  27 shared

• Herman Cappelen

  15 shared

• Maria Lasonen‐Aarnio

  University of Helsinki

  13 shared

• Yoaav Isaacs

  Baylor University

  13 shared

• Clayton Littlejohn

  11 shared

• Jeffrey Sanford Russell

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  11 shared

• David Manley

  University of Bristol

  11 shared