Professional Career

Before coming to Boston College in 2000 as a tenured professor, Professor Garcia taught at Rutgers University (New Brunswick), Georgetown University, and at the University of Notre Dame.

Fields of Interest

• His research has focused on normative moral theory, including the concepts of goodness, desert, and virtue, and on articulating and defending a "virtues-based, role-centered, and patient-focused" moral theory, while critiquing consequentialist and other alternatives.
• In the last decade, he has written an influential series of articles philosophically developing what he calls a "volitional" conception of racism, and he is currently arguing for a deflationary approach to race and ethnicity, and for narrow limits to what can be socially constructed.
• He's addressed such bioethical issues as euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, artificial nutrition and hydration, and ethnic perspectives on medical ethics.

Current Courses

• Normative Theories
• Virtue & Action
• Normative Conflict
• Values & the Good
• 20th Century European Moral Philosophy
• Utilitarianism
• Language & Ontology of Morals
• Recent Metaethics
• Recent Neo-Kantian Moral Theory
• Introduction to Black Philosophy
• Philosophy & Race

Other Professional Activities

• Du Bois Institute, Harvard University: Non-resident Fellow (2003-2005, 2006-continuing)
• American Philosophical Association Eastern Division, Executive Committee: Member, 2005-2008

Recent Publications

• Health versus Harm: Euthanasia and Physicians' Duties," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, forthcoming.
• "Being Unimpressed with Ourselves: Reconceiving Humility," Philosophia, forthcoming.
• "Racial and Ethnic Identity?" in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, edited by J. J. E. Gracia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), forthcoming.
• "Revisiting African-American Perspectives and Medical Ethics," in African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity, edited by Lawrence Prograis & Edmund Pellegrino (Washington: Georgetown University Press), 2007.
• "Practical Reason and Its Virtues," in Intellectual Virtue, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 81-107.