David Enoch (philosopher)

David Enoch is an ethicist and philosopher of law with research interests in moral, political and legal philosophy within the analytic tradition. He is the co-director of the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy and has been the Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2005. He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and Bachelor of Laws degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He then completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University in 2003.

Enoch is a member of the Israeli Law Professors' Forum for Democracy, established in 2023 to analyze and address of the various reforms proposed by Israel’s 37th Government to change Israel’s democratic regime.

Philosophy
In metaethics, Enoch defends “Robust Realism”, the view according to which there are objective, universal, non-natural moral truths, truths that when successful in our moral inquiries we discover rather than create, that don’t constitutively depend on us and our dispositions.

In political philosophy, Enoch criticizes Rawlsian versions of liberalism, and is developing a non-Rawlsian liberalism, that is sensitive to the concerns of the real world, and that attempts to incorporate the insights of liberalism’s critics.

In legal philosophy, Enoch criticizes common ways of doing general jurisprudence, and works on specific normative questions concerning the law, for instance, when it comes to moral and legal luck, or to the status of statistical evidence.

In ethics, Enoch defends moral deference, and the views that consent should be understood contrastively, that a distinction within the value of autonomy helps to clarify the status of hypothetical consent, and that the intending-foreseeing distinction is suspicious – especially when applied to state action.