Dr Bradford Kim

• Ancient Chinese Philosophy
• Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
• Ethics

Dr Kim has research interests in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and their global histories (especially in ancient China and ancient Greece). Below is a summary of how Dr Kim’s recent research ties together and where it is headed. For his most up-to-date CV and his full list of publications (with abstracts), please visit his PhilPeople page here.

The summative effect of Dr Kim’s research is to highlight the fundamental differences between ancient philosophy and modern philosophy and thereby illuminate the latter's deepest commitments. Take for instance the ideas about self-interest that we find in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the focus of Kim’s earlier work. Kim has given reasons to doubt a tendency in the scholarship, one that attributes altruism to Aristotle and thereby establishes continuity between Aristotle and the modern West. It has been typical for interpreters to point to Aristotle’s depiction of the virtuous agent as acting for the sake of the fine (to kalon) and then to infer the agent’s disinterestedness, but Kim has argued against this in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Others have inferred disinterestedness from Aristotle’s idea that in virtue friendships, one loves friends on account of the friends themselves. Again, Kim has cast doubt on this reading in the European Journal of Philosophy; relatedly, he has raised questions about the disinterestedness of loving simpliciter (see the Journal of the History of Philosophy) and of choosing something on account of itself (see History of Philosophy Quarterly). In Ancient Philosophy, Kim has argued against numerous attempts to read Aristotle’s arguments for why the happy person needs friends in a disinterested fashion. More recently, Kim has given detailed accounts of inegalitarianism and partiality in Aristotle, in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and Apeiron, respectively. Kim will continue to explore Aristotle’s treatments of self-interest and partiality in a book project that gives a detailed account of Aristotelian self-love.

Shifting from ancient Greece to ancient China, Dr Kim has also assessed the moral-political philosophy of the Mohists. The Mohists are often deemed to be the first consequentialist theorists in history; after all, their key principle is that what makes an action right is that it benefits the world. Virtually all commentators have attributed to the Mohists the equal moral consideration for everyone that we find in Bentham and Mill, whereby in benefiting the world, one considers everyone's benefit equally. Building on work published in Analysis, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Dao (2024 and 2025), Kim argues in Consequentialism in the Mohist Tradition (Oxford University Press) that the early Mohists suspend moral consideration for poor moral performers whereas the late Mohists adopt a more flexible approach to moral consideration, extending it and retracting it as would benefit the world in context. This book constitutes a timely investigation into the question of how one should treat those with whom one has a suboptimal relationship, whether because of moral disagreement or because the other has committed acts 'beyond the pale'.