Peter Railton is John Stephenson Perrin Professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Professor Railton's main research has been in ethics and the philosophy of science, focusing especially on questions about the nature of objectivity, value, norms, and explanation. Recently, he has also begun working in aesthetics, moral psychology, and the theory of action. He has a special interest in the bearing of empirical research in psychology and evolutionary theory on these questions and he has written several seminal papers on scientific explanation.
A collection of some of his papers in ethics and meta-ethics, Facts, Values, and Norms, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2003. He has been a visiting professor at Berkeley and Princeton, and has received fellowships from the Society for the Humanities (Cornell), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been associated with CREA (Paris) and CSMN (Oslo).