Kurt Baier (1917–2010) was an Austrian-born moral philosopher who spent the most productive decades of his career at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the faculty in 1962. His central project—working out the rational foundations of morality in the tradition of Hobbes—shaped a generation of philosophers who passed through Pittsburgh during his tenure, including the late David Gauthier and the late Gerald Gaus.
Baier argued that morality is best understood not as a set of transcendent commands or brute intuitions but as a system of social rules that can be rationally justified from within, for the benefit of everyone subject to them. His 1958 book The Moral Point of View remains one of the clearest statements of this position. What Gaus later called the “Baier-Strawson view”—the idea that social morality consists of a framework of mutually advantageous and impartially justifiable rules constraining the pursuit of self-interest—became a foundational commitment in Gaus’s own contractarian project and, through Gaus, in much subsequent work on public reason and social contract theory.
Baier’s influence is less visible than it should be, partly because he published sparingly after his 1995 book The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason and Morality, and partly because the tradition he helped build is now more closely associated with his successors. This page is a starting point for anyone who wants to understand where those ideas came from.
The Portrait
The image above is held by the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. It was made by the sculptor and designer Erwin Fabian at the Hay Internment Camp in New South Wales during the Second World War. Baier, born in Vienna, fled to London in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution, three months before his final law examinations. Classified as a “friendly enemy alien” at the outbreak of war, he was deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera in August 1940. The voyage was brutal and the prisoners were systematically robbed and beaten by the crew, and Baier arrived in Sydney with nothing but an old sweater over a pair of pajamas. He was sure the soldiers on the quay were going to shoot him—until one of them walked over, handed him his rifle, and said “Hold this, mate, while I take a leak.” Interned at Hay, he encountered German Jewish refugees who had been working at Cambridge and the London School of Economics, and was allowed to take courses in philosophy. Erwin Fabian, also a refugee—born in Berlin, the son of the artist Max Fabian—was a fellow internee who drew Baier’s portrait at the camp. The work was a gift of the artist to the gallery in 2002.
Released from internment, Baier was admitted to Melbourne University in 1941, completed his doctorate at Oxford under Stephen Toulmin in 1952, and returned to Australia to join the philosophy department at Canberra University College before leaving for Pittsburgh in 1962.
Having learned to philosophize entirely in English, he apparently could not do philosophy in his native German, though he remained a fluent speaker and often returned to Austria. At Pittsburgh, he was joined by his wife Annette Baier (1929–2012), herself a major philosopher whose work on Hume, especially A Progress of Sentiments (1991) and Moral Prejudices (1995), established her as one of the most important moral philosophers of her generation. The Baiers are believed to be the only husband-and-wife pair to each serve as President of the Eastern Division of the APA, deliver the Paul Carus Lectures, and hold membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They retired to New Zealand in 1995 where they were active in the University of Otago philosophy community until his death in 2010 (at 93!) and hers in 2012 (at 83).
Key Works
“The Meaning of Life” (1957). Inaugural lecture, Canberra University College.
Baier’s most widely read essay, later anthologized dozens of times. He argues that the question “What is the meaning of life?” is not unanswerable but merely badly framed, and that a secular, reason-based account of purpose is both possible and sufficient. A good entry point to his broader philosophical temperament.
The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics (1958). Cornell University Press.
The central work. Baier develops a comprehensive account of morality as a system of reasons that override self-interest when self-interest would be collectively self-defeating. The “moral point of view” is the standpoint from which we assess rules as beneficial for everyone, not just for the agent. This book set the terms for the Hobbesian rationalist tradition in moral philosophy that Gauthier and Gaus would later develop in different directions. It also brought moral “reasons” to the forefront of ethics in a systematic way.
“Moral Obligation” (1966). American Philosophical Quarterly 3(3): 210–226.
Baier’s most sustained treatment of what makes something a moral obligation as opposed to a mere social expectation or prudential requirement. He argues that moral obligations are distinguished by their overriding character and their grounding in a system of reasons that can be justified from the standpoint of everyone affected. Essential background for understanding the normative force he later attributes to the moral point of view.
“Moral Value and Moral Worth” (1970). The Monist 54(1): 18–30.
A careful analytic distinction between two ways of evaluating moral agents and their actions. Baier separates moral value (the goodness or badness of what is done or produced) from moral worth (the credit or discredit due to the agent for doing it). The distinction matters because it allows him to preserve the intuition that an agent who does the right thing for the wrong reasons has produced moral value without displaying moral worth, a question that runs through Kantian and consequentialist disputes alike.
“The Justification of Governmental Authority” (1972). Journal of Philosophy 69(20): 700–716.
Baier extends his account of rational moral justification into political philosophy, asking what would justify the coercive authority of government. The answer, consistent with his broader Hobbesian program, turns on whether governmental authority serves the interests of those subject to it better than the available alternatives. An early statement of the kind of contractarian political justification that Gaus would later develop more fully in The Order of Public Reason.
“Moral Development” (1974). The Monist 58(4): 601–615.
Baier addresses the relationship between individual moral growth and the moral progress of societies. He resists the temptation to reduce one to the other, arguing instead that social moral advance creates the conditions under which individual moral development becomes possible, while individual moral insight can in turn drive social change. One of his more underappreciated essays, and relevant to contemporary debates about moral progress.
“Rationality and Morality” (1977). Erkenntnis 11(2): 197–223.
The most direct and technically precise statement of Baier’s core thesis: that morality and rationality are not merely contingently related but conceptually linked, such that a fully rational agent has reason to be moral and a fully moral system is one that rational agents could endorse. This is the philosophical engine behind both The Moral Point of View and The Rational and the Moral Order, laid out in compressed form.
“Moral Reasons” (1978). Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3: 62–74.
A concise statement of Baier’s account of why moral reasons are genuinely reasons—not mere expressions of sentiment or social pressure—and how they relate to an agent’s other practical commitments.
“The Social Source of Reason” (1978). Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 51(6): 707–733.
Baier’s presidential address to the Eastern Division of the APA. He argues that reason itself has social sources—that rationality is not a property of isolated individuals but emerges from and depends on social practices of giving and evaluating reasons. This paper bridges his moral philosophy and his epistemology, and anticipates the argument of The Rational and the Moral Order that the moral order is rooted in the rational order, which is itself socially constituted. The most important precursor to the 1995 book.
“Justice and the Aims of Political Philosophy” (1989). Ethics 99(4): 771–790.
Published as part of a symposium on Rawls, Baier argues that political philosophy has been too narrowly focused on justice at the expense of other aims, and that a broader conception of what political institutions are for—including stability, legitimacy, and the facilitation of cooperative life—is needed. He introduces the idea of “constitutional consensus” as an alternative to overlapping consensus on principles of justice, holding that political stability can rest on agreement about constitutional procedures for making law rather than agreement on substantive principles. A late-career essay that anticipates some of the themes Gaus would take up in The Order of Public Reason.
The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason and Morality (1995). Open Court (Paul Carus Lectures).
Baier’s late, mature restatement of his project. He deepens the social dimension of his earlier work, arguing that both rationality and morality are rooted in social practices and that the moral order emerges from the rational order rather than standing apart from it. More ambitious and more difficult than The Moral Point of View, but essential for understanding how the Hobbesian program can avoid collapsing into mere prudence.
Responses, in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Reason, Ethics, and Society: Themes from Kurt Baier, with His Responses (1996). Open Court.
Baier’s replies to a set of critical essays by leading moral philosophers. The most useful late-career overview of his positions, since he addresses misreadings of his work and clarifies how the pieces of his project fit together. Read in conjunction with the essays themselves.
Secondary Literature and Related Works
Jerome B. Schneewind (ed.), Reason, Ethics, and Society: Themes from Kurt Baier, with His Responses (1996). Open Court.
The only full-length critical treatment of Baier’s work. Contributors include Allan Gibbard, Stephen Darwall, and David Gauthier. The volume’s bibliography of Baier’s writings is the most complete available.
Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason (2011). Cambridge University Press. Especially Part I.
Gaus develops what he calls the “Baier-Strawson” conception of social morality—the view that moral rules are socially generated norms justified by their role in making cooperative life possible. Understanding Gaus’s use of Baier is essential for seeing how Baier’s project lives on in contemporary political philosophy.
David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (1986). Oxford University Press.
Gauthier’s contractarian masterwork, written at Pittsburgh during the period of overlap with Baier. Not a commentary on Baier, but the most important parallel development of the Hobbesian program Baier helped launch. The two projects share a starting point—that morality must be grounded in rational advantage—but reach different conclusions about what that grounding requires.
The Baier Pitt-Arizona-PPE Connection
Baier joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1962, where he helped build one of the strongest philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. David Gauthier arrived in 1980 from the University of Toronto. Gerald Gaus overlapped with both during his time at Pittsburgh. The three did not form a school in any formal sense, but they shared a Hobbesian conviction that the relationship between individual rationality and social morality is the central problem of moral and political philosophy. Each answered that problem differently. Baier, through the idea of a moral point of view that transcends but is rooted in individual rationality and can appeal to personal justification, Gauthier, through rational bargaining theory, and Gaus, through a framework of public justification. Taken together, the Pittsburgh tradition represents the most sustained attempt in contemporary philosophy to ground morality in practical reason without appealing to moral intuitions or natural rights as primitives.
The formal advising lineage extends beyond Pittsburgh itself. Stephen Darwall completed his doctorate under Baier at Pitts. Allen Buchanan studied under Darwall, and David Schmidtz studied under Buchanan at Arizona. At the University of Arizona, David Schmidtz built what some have called the “Arizona School” of political philosophy, hiring Gerald Gaus, Steven Wall, and several others to build a distinctive political philosophy program that used a PPE approach. A generation of political philosophers was trained there, including Matt Zwolinski, Jason Brennan, Chris Freiman, Kevin Vallier, Keith Hankins, Chad van Schoelandt, Brian Kogelmann, Jacob Barrett, and Alex Schaefer, among others. Bas van der Vossen, Ryan Muldoon, Carmen Pavel, and Mark Budolfson (among many others) visited for long stays or were post-docs during that time.
Schmidtz and Gaus served as my doctoral co-advisors, which means the connection to Baier runs through two independent channels. One is a formal advising chain from Baier through Darwall, Buchanan, and Schmidtz on one side, and the intellectual influence of Baier on Gaus at Pittsburgh on the other. Above Baier, the chain continues through Stephen Toulmin, who completed his doctorate at Cambridge under R. B. Braithwaite and Ludwig Wittgenstein—a connection worth noting given Braithwaite’s pioneering use of game theory in moral philosophy.
For the full advising network, see this lineage on the Philosophy Academic Tree.