Professor Michele M Moody-Adams: Imagining Democracy

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

The political theorist Robert Dahl maintained that whatever the imperfections of its past and present iterations, at its best, democracy provides a way of life that is ‘more desirable than any feasible alternative.’ But if we hope to create and preserve robust democracies, we must acknowledge and explore the role of imagination in constituting political communities as democracies, and in reconstituting political life when those communities’ institutions and practices are in need of repair. Helping to generate consensus on rationally justifiable principles to govern institutions can be a valuable philosophical project. But as Richard Rorty believed, two of the most important tasks of political philosophy are (1) stimulating moral imagination by presenting new ways of embodying democratic values and (a) inspiring political hope that we can substantively approximate the democratic moral ideal. This talk considers what it means for political philosophy to constructively undertake these tasks.

About the speaker

Michele Moody-Adams is Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. Before Columbia, Moody-Adams taught at Cornell University, where she was also Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life. She has also taught at Wellesley College, the University of Rochester, and Indiana University, where she served as Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences.

She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and the virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is the author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope (2022), and a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (1997). She is also a co-author on the multi-author work Against Happiness (2023). She is currently working on two book projects: Renewing Democracy and Reclaiming the Idea of the Human.

Moody-Adams holds a B.A. from Wellesley College, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and she earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University under the supervision of John Rawls. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.