Mark C. Murphy

Mark C. Murphy is the Cathy and Jack Brennan Chair of Virtue Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. He previously taught at Georgetown University (1995-2026) and the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1993-1995). He received his PhD from Notre Dame in 1993.

Murphy works in ethics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of religion. In ethics and philosophy of law, he is primarily concerned to work out and defend positions broadly within the natural law tradition. In ethics and philosophy of religion, he is interested in thinking through questions about theistic explanation of moral norms and about the distinctive norms of action by which God acts. He is the author of seven books and is past editor of the journal Faith and Philosophy.

Along with Christian Miller (Wake Forest) and Chris Tucker (William and Mary), Murphy is co-organizer of the annual Theistic Ethics Workshop, which rotates among our campuses.

Representative Publications

Natural Law and Practical Rationality (Cambridge, 2001)
An Essay on Divine Authority (Cornell, 2002)
Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics (Cambridge, 2006)
Philosophy of Law: The Fundamentals (Blackwell, 2006)
God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality (Oxford, 2011)
God's Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Action and the Argument from Evil (Oxford, 2017)
Divine Holiness and Divine Action (Oxford, 2021)