Jonathan Glover

Jonathan Glover (born 1941) is a British moral philosopher whose work addresses the hardest questions in ethics: When is killing justified? What makes a person the same person over time? Should parents be able to choose the genetic characteristics of their children? And — the question that animates his most important book — why do human beings commit atrocities, and what can be done to prevent them? His book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (1999) is one of the most ambitious and disturbing works of moral philosophy published in the last fifty years: a systematic attempt to understand the psychology of mass violence — from the trenches of World War I to the Holocaust to Rwanda — and to identify the moral resources that sometimes prevent human beings from destroying each other.

Life and Career

Glover was born in 1941 and educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He taught philosophy at New College, Oxford, for over thirty years before becoming Director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College London. He has also held visiting positions at numerous universities and has been involved in public policy discussions on bioethics, genetic ethics, and the laws of war.

Unlike many academic philosophers, Glover has consistently engaged with real-world problems — he was a member of a working party advising the European Commission on biotechnology and has contributed to debates on euthanasia, reproductive ethics, and the morality of humanitarian intervention.

Causing Death and Saving Lives (1977)

Glover’s first major book is a rigorous examination of the moral issues surrounding killing: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, war, and the question of whether there is a morally significant difference between killing and letting die. The book is notable for its clarity, its refusal of easy answers, and its willingness to follow arguments where they lead. Glover concludes that the conventional distinction between killing and letting die is less morally significant than most people believe, and that the sanctity-of-life principle, while important, cannot be treated as an absolute.

The book became a standard text in applied ethics courses and influenced a generation of philosophers and medical ethicists.

I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity (1988)

I is Glover’s exploration of the problem of personal identity — what makes you the same person over time, and what would it take to make you a different person. The book draws on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and literature to examine questions about memory, continuity of consciousness, and the self. It is written with unusual accessibility for a work of analytic philosophy and engages with thought experiments (brain transplants, teleportation, split-brain cases) that illuminate the strangeness of personal identity.

Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (1999)

Humanity is Glover’s magnum opus — a book that attempts nothing less than a moral reckoning with the worst things human beings did to each other in the twentieth century. The book examines World War I (particularly the decision-making that led to and perpetuated the slaughter), Nazism and the Holocaust, Stalinism, Mao’s China, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Glover’s approach is neither historical narrative nor philosophical abstraction but something between the two: he uses the historical evidence to identify the psychological mechanisms — tribalism, dehumanisation, obedience to authority, moral distancing, the erosion of sympathy — that enable ordinary people to participate in atrocities. He draws on the work of Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Hannah Arendt, but his analysis goes further: he identifies specific “moral resources” — the human responses of sympathy, moral identity, and the ability to see others as fully human — that sometimes prevent atrocities, and he asks what institutional and educational conditions might strengthen these resources.

The book is not comfortable reading. Glover describes specific atrocities in careful detail, not for shock value but because he believes that understanding how these things happen requires confronting what actually happened. The writing is measured, precise, and deeply humane — Glover never treats suffering as an abstraction.

Humanity was widely reviewed and praised. It has been compared to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and to Primo Levi’s writings as an attempt to confront the moral catastrophes of the modern age with philosophical seriousness.

Choosing Children (2006)

Choosing Children addresses the ethics of genetic selection — prenatal screening, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and the possibility of genetic enhancement. Glover argues that the disability rights critique of prenatal screening is important but not decisive, and that parents should have significant freedom to make genetic choices about their children, within limits set by concerns about inequality and social pressure.

Critical Standing

Glover is one of the most important living moral philosophers in the English-speaking world. Humanity is his masterpiece — a book that combines philosophical rigour with moral seriousness and historical knowledge in a way that few academic philosophers have achieved. His earlier work on killing, personal identity, and bioethics has been consistently influential. He writes with unusual clarity for an analytic philosopher, and his willingness to engage with real moral problems rather than purely theoretical puzzles gives his work a weight and urgency that much academic philosophy lacks.

Collecting Glover

Causing Death and Saving Lives (1977, Penguin) was published as a paperback original and is common. Humanity (1999, Jonathan Cape; US edition Yale University Press, 2000) in first hardcover edition brings $30–$80. I (1988, Allen Lane) brings $20–$50. Glover’s books are modestly valued by collectors but are essential reading in moral philosophy.