September 10, 1932—November 9, 2023
We mourn the death of our esteemed colleague, teacher, and friend, David Gauthier (F.R.S.C.).
David was born in Toronto and became fascinated, while still in his pram, with trolley cars; that fascination morphed over time into one with what we now call “light rail transit”. David was educated at the University of Toronto (B.A. Honors, 1954); Harvard (A.M., 1955); and the University of Oxford (B. Phil., 1957; D. Phil., 1961). He taught from 1958-1980 at the University of Toronto, where he served as Department Chair from 1974-1979 and displayed real savoir faire in the delicate task of merging previously distinct faculties. An occasional newspaper columnist and writer on public affairs, David once ran, unsuccessfully, for election to the Canadian House of Commons. Their loss, our gain.
David joined the faculty at Pitt in 1980, served as Department Chair from 1983 to 1987, and was appointed Distinguished Service Professor in 1986. (He also had visiting appointments at UCLA, Berkeley, Princeton, Irvine, and the University of Waterloo.) In 2001, David retired and was granted Emeritus status. He and his wife Joan, whose gracious hospitality was a gift to the department, returned to Toronto, where friends and former colleagues welcomed them with open arms. In September of 2022, the Toronto department hosted a celebration of David’s 90th birthday and his two recently released books: Rational Deliberation and Hobbes and Political Contractarianism (both OUP 2022).
David epitomized the spirit of our department, grounding creative work in moral and political philosophy in scholarly engagement with the work of historical figures, especially Hobbes and Rousseau. A stellar thinker (on which more below), he focused throughout his career on the relationship between morality and self-interest, and the relation of each to rationality. His first book, Logic of Leviathan (OUP 1969), led to a resurgence of interest in Hobbes. In his signature work Morals by Agreement (OUP 1987), David drew on developments in the theory of rational choice and game theory to argue both for the rational basis of morality and for the limits that morality thus based must have. He introduced the concept of “constrained maximization” to explain both how rational beings could have a fundamental motivation to refrain from maximizing in certain interactions and how much rational agents would be willing to concede in reaching cooperative solutions to their common problems.
David also published important work on Rousseau, a figure far removed from any idea of grounding anything at all in the rationality of a stable, self-sufficient subject. In Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence (CUP 2006), he focused on the instability of the self and Rousseau’s various attempts to create through artifice the circumstances in which a stable self could emerge. Sentiment is no less remarkable than Morals by Agreement but so different in character that a reader who discovered anonymous manuscripts of each might well ascribe them to different authors. Such was the versatility of David’s open and always discerning mind.
These features, combined with David’s respect for the independence of others, made him an exemplary advisor and colleague, even of those with whom his disagreements ran deep. Students fondly recall him pointing out to them overlooked passages that supported their criticisms of his own views. And he relished his conversations with Annette Baier, another dear departed colleague who was among his fiercest critics. One of the speakers at Annette’s retirement conference in fact commented that the students she had assumed were Annette’s turned out to be David’s, and vice versa. His capacity for allowing others to be themselves surely contributed to his students’ and colleagues’ abiding affection for him.
David’s work has been profoundly influential and generated widespread recognition. For his seventieth birthday former students edited a Festschrift in his honour, Practical Rationality and Preference (CUP 2001); on his eightieth birthday his friends and former students endowed a graduate scholarship in his name; and on his ninetieth birthday they celebrated the publication of his last two books. But not his last thoughts: his amanuensis reports that he was working on an article in the last week of his life. His stellar reputation lives on and we can all continue to look up to him: see Asteroid 15911, Davidgauthier.