Margaret Urban Walker

Margaret Urban Walker (born August 8, 1948) is an American philosopher and the Donald J. Schuenke Chair Emerita in Philosophy at Marquette University. Before her appointment at Marquette, she was the Lincoln Professor of Ethics at Arizona State University, and before that she was at Fordham University. received her bachelor's in philosophy from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1969. She went on to receive her master's in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1971, and her doctorate in philosophy, also from Northwestern, in 1975. She held visiting appointments at the Washington University in St. Louis, the University of South Florida, and the Catholic University of Leuven. She has contributed to research projects with the International Center for Transitional Justice on gender and reparations and truth commissions. She was drawn to this area through her earlier work, in which she focused on the effects of social inequalities on the way morality is understood in ethics and everyday life. Some of her earlier research focused on developing a social differences-focused approach to ethical theory. She strongly defends the view that although moral understandings are inextricably linked to the historical and social practices that they derived from, that those historical and social practices not only can be, but must be critically assessed.

Publications

Books Walker has authored seven books, numerous book chapters, and a large number of papers.

Book chapters

Journal articles From 2005 to 2010, Walker served as an associate editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She served as series co-editor of Feminist Constructions, a 25-volume series of books released between 2002 and 2007. She co-edited the annual volume of the Association of Feminist Ethics and Social Theory from 2003 to 2005.