I am PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Arizona. I specialize in political philosophy and normative ethics. My research is at the intersection of rational choice theory, moral psychology, and the relation of individual rationality to social rules.
I have a special interest in reviving the idea of the social contract by using techniques and tools from evolutionary game theory, agent-based modeling, and comparative institutional analysis. I am the PhilPapers.org editor for the social contract section and an author on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on contemporary approaches to the social contract. I have also written about public reason, egalitarianism, justice, Epicurean political theory, Adam Smith, and social evolution. More on my research can be found here.
My work has been published in Philosophical Studies, The European Journal of Philosophy, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Adam Smith Review, and in several edited volumes. Some of my recent publications can be found here and my CV can be found here.
The chairs of my thesis committee are Jerry Gaus and David Schmidtz. The committee also includes Steven Wall, and Shaun Nichols. An abstract of my thesis, Contractarianism with a Human Face, is available on my publications page.
You can contact me at jthrashe<at>email.arizona.edu