Allen buchanan (b. 1948) is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University. He works in three chief areas: the philosophy of international law and justice, biomedical ethics, and a new field he has christened “social moral epistemology.” Buchanan attributes his turn toward political philosophy in his irst year of graduate school to the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In his extensive work since, he acknowledges a large debt to Rawls, even as he extends or challenges key elements of the Rawlsian program.

Buchanan’s work in the philosophy of international law, where Rawls’s inluence is strongest, centers on the nature and justiication of human rights, the legitimacy of international law-making institutions and the use of force in international relations. Buchanan criticizes Rawls’s account of human rights in The Law of Peoples for its minimalist content and its refusal to ground human rights in characteristics that all humans share. Both features, Buchanan argues, derive from a misuse of the political liberal notion of “reasonableness.” We can construct a more robust and intuitive account of human rights without violating a commitment to respecting reasonable moral and metaphysical disagreement. On the topic of international governance, Buchanan draws on Rawls’s distinction between justice and legitimacy in Political Liberalism to develop an account of what, if anything, might render the rule of international legislative bodies acceptable. In his work on the morality of war, Buchanan has done much to extend the narrow focus of traditional just war theory to novel questions concerning humanitarian intervention, preventive war, and forcible democratization.