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David McCabe holds the Richard J and Joan Head Chair of Philosophy at Colgate University, where he recently completed a six-year term as the Director of the Arts & Humanities division. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Northwestern University. His area of research specialization is political philosophy, and along with his monograph Modus Vivendi Liberalism (Cambridge University press, 2011), he has published articles in several journals.
Professor McCabe's research project at the Institute of Advanced Studies explored the oft-noted tension between (i) the norms that characterize ordinary morality and (ii) the norms distinctively appropriate to the political domain. He was working to articulate a position he calls ethical Machiavellianism, which aims to show that certain important ideas associated with versions of political realism (especially the version advanced by Machiavelli in The Prince) are compatible with a defensible commitment to moral principles that can satisfactorily address various challenges thought to arise in the domain of political morality.
