Dr Carl Fox

Profile

I’ve been at the IDEA Centre for ten years. Before that, I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield. I have an MA in Philosophy from Sheffield, an MA in Journalism from Dublin City University, a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Trinity College Dublin, and a gold star from my mother. Before leaving Ireland to return to philosophy, I worked in journalism as a sub-editor for Real-Time Editing and Design.

Research interests

I work on a range of topics, but my main research interest is the ethics of the public sphere. In particular, I’m exploring two related ideas. The first is that political philosophers have been too focused on the role the public sphere plays in legitimating democratic states, and have neglected the significance of the ways in which it does, can, and should foster stability in political communities, which is underpinned by a disposition to play fair with others and a warranted belief that, by and large, your fellow citizens can be trusted to play fair with you too. The second has to do with a tendency that philosophers have when discussing issues like free speech and hatespeech that are crucial to determining how we want to organise, regulate, and support the public sphere. Too often they frame their questions either at the macro level (what the state ought or ought not do) or the micro level (what people ought or ought not do in individual conversations). I argue that we can make a lot more progress if we attend to something that is actually blindingly obvious – the public sphere is composed of a wide range of different practices with different aims and norms. By attending to this variation, and thinking carefully about the unique contributions that all of these practices can make to a flourishing democracy, we can take a fresh looks at the expectations, rules, and permissions we apply to people participating in them. 

I have co-edited (along with Joe Saunders) two books on media ethics: The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics and Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy. I have also written for The Conversation, and I was a co-investigator on a major AHRC-funded project examining media regulation and the role of codes of ethics for the press in ten European countries.

• Defining Freedom of the Press

Qualifications

• PhD Philosophy
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Professional memberships

• Society for Applied Philosophy

Student education

Office Hours :

• Tuesday 4–5pm
• Wednesday 10–11am

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Aesthetic, Moral and Political Philosophy
• Leadership Ethics, Persuasion and Public Reason