Dr Dominic Burbidge is Lecturer in Politics in Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, and a Research Coordinator in the Faculty of Law. He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics in Princeton University. Dr Burbidge additionally serves as Director of the Canterbury Institute.
Research
Dr Burbidge focuses on social trust, human coordination and civic virtue. He recently published the book An Experiment in Devolution and is currently working to apply insights from virtue ethics to political theory. His present research focus is on the theory and practice of civic virtue. Dr Burbidge believes that the promotion of trustworthiness is key to stable and legitimate government, and that the best set of resources for understanding trustworthiness lie in virtue theory. In this vein, he seeks to develop insights from Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and MacIntyre in exploring the role of virtue in the public sphere. Broadly, this draws on the resurgent interest in virtue theory within philosophy (Anscombe, MacIntyre, Annas, Hursthouse) and begins its application to politics. Dr Burbidge is therefore keen to help renew discussion of civic virtue, and apply it to present questions of social trust. His most recent work in this area applies virtue ethics to discussions of technology and Artificial Intelligence, arguing that ethics of technology should be understood as a habit of practice that asks us to define the ends to any efficiency gain.
