Rate My Professor Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore served as Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago for 34 years, from 1992 until his retirement in 2026. A New Zealand native, he completed his MA at the University of Canterbury in 1986 and earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1991 as a Rhodes Scholar. Throughout his career, Moore was deeply engaged in teaching ethics courses such as PHIL413 Ethical Theory and BITC202 Animal Ethics, supervising numerous master's and doctoral students in philosophy, and contributing to university governance, including spearheading the revival of the university's Inaugural Professorial Lectures series. He also held the position of Head of Philosophy and served as an Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Bioethics.

Moore's research focused on ethical theory, the philosophy of well-being, practical ethics in health and bioethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of mind. His influential works include the widely accessed entry on 'Hedonism' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; 'Well-being: A philosophical basis for health services' (1994); 'Compensation for Injuries Suffered by Participants in Commercially Sponsored Clinical Trials in New Zealand' (1997, co-authored with Nicola Peart); principal authorship of 'Getting Through Together: Ethical Values for a Pandemic' (2007, Ministry of Health); 'The job of ethics committees' (2018, Journal of Medical Ethics); and a chapter titled 'Wellbeing and Intergenerational Ethics' in a 2025 edited collection. In public service, he was Founding Chair of New Zealand's National Ethics Advisory Committee from 2001 to 2010, leading reforms to health research ethics committees that were implemented by the Minister of Health. He also served on the Health Research Council's Data Monitoring Committee for clinical trials and advised multiple Ministers of Health.