Chiara Cordelli

Chiara Cordelli is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. During 2017-18 she will be a faculty fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her main areas of research are political philosophy and applied ethics, with a particular focus on theories of justice, egalitarianism, normative defenses of the state, the public/private distinction in liberal theory, and the ethics of philanthropy and assistance. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, as well as in several edited volumes, including NOMOS. One of her articles, “Justice as Fairness and Relational Resources” was included in the 2016 Philosopher’s Annual. She is also the co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

At the moment she is working on a book, provisionally entitled Privatizing Justice. The book argues that privatization, as experienced in many contemporary democracies, constitutes a return (albeit partial) to the Kantian state of nature and, as such, poses a fundamental threat to political legitimacy. After providing a non-instrumental account of the ethical limits of privatization and of the way privatization has transformed the modern state, the book develops principles of justice and legitimacy for contexts where both the funding and the provision of justice-required goods are increasingly privatized.

Cordelli earned her BA from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and her PhD from University College London. Before joining Chicago, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society and a lecturer (assistant professor) at the University of Exeter (UK). She held visiting positions at the Library of Congress in D.C., the Center for Human Values at Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Center for Ethics at Harvard.