Richard Booker Brandt was born on October 17, 1910, in Wilmington, Ohio. He graduated from Denison University in 1930 and received a second BA from Trinity College in Cambridge, U.K. After receiving a PhD in philosophy at Yale University in 1936, Brandt taught at Swarthmore College and then at the University of Michigan, where he was named Roy Wood Sellars Distinguished College Professor of Philosophy. Brandt was a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; he was also a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For more than fifty years, Brandt addressed a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied issues in ethics, drawing on the natural and social sciences to enrich our understanding of morality. His empiricist orientation displayed...