-Adam Cureton

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Kenan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel-Hill, was a leading moral philosopher and Kant scholar. He taught at UCLA from 1968 to 1984 and at UNC from 1984 to 2017. In his books, which include Autonomy and Self-Respect, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory, and Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations, Tom developed Kantian ideas and brought them to bear on ethics and political philosophy with clarity, breadth, and humanity. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served as president of the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division, and received UNC’s Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Tom was my PhD supervisor, my collaborator, and one of my closest friends. He supported me in innumerable ways during graduate school and long afterward. My experience with him was not unique. Throughout the profession, I often heard the same simple refrain: “I love Tom Hill.”

Tom was astonishingly kind, generous, patient, and free of arrogance. He was soft-spoken and deliberate, a superb listener, and very funny. He also loved a bit of gossip. His deep egalitarianism was evident across his life. Once, in graduate school, I presented to him what I thought was a powerful objection to an interpretation of Kant that he had defended. I remember him replying, “Well, maybe I was wrong about that. Let’s go back to the text.” My objection did not survive that return to the text, but his response stayed with me.

Tom often saw his philosophical work as largely about helping people notice sensible and important ideas that dominant views might crowd out. He described good mentoring as helping graduate students “grow their flowers” by giving promising ideas opportunity to develop. For many of his graduate students and others, Tom became a personal as well as a philosophical adviser. When I would bring him a difficult problem, he would patiently lay out the options and carefully work through each of them with me without putting his finger on the scales. He helped us exercise our autonomy, develop and maintain our self-respect, and strive for ideals that he himself often exemplified.

This same spirit shaped his conception of philosophy. For him, philosophy was a cooperative enterprise that involves understanding ourselves and one another, identifying what is good in an idea, helping it to develop, reconsidering it from different standpoints, and hoping that shared inquiry might gradually lead us to converge on better views. He returned to difficult philosophical questions over several decades, often revising his views, answering objections, and otherwise practicing the moral and intellectual humility that he subtly encouraged in others.

The most remarkable thing about Tom was the unity between his philosophy and his life. Respect for autonomy guided how he taught, advised, disagreed with, and befriended people. He looked for the good in others, respected their complexity, and pursued demanding ideals in his own life without moralism or conceit. Tom was the best person I have ever known. I loved him, I miss him, and I am profoundly grateful to him for showing so many of us what it can be like to live the moral life.