Aaron James holds a PhD from Harvard and is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Assholes: A Theory and Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy, and he was awarded a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and spent the 2009–10 academic year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He was a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University in 2013.