Rate My Professor Gil Hersch

Gil Hersch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Program in 2017, advanced to Assistant Professor in 2020, and was promoted to Associate Professor. He concurrently serves as a Core Faculty member at the David H. Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Hersch earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 2016.

Hersch's academic interests center on social and political philosophy, philosophy of social science, applied ethics, and PPE. He addresses political, ethical, and methodological questions arising at the intersections of economics, policy, business, and experimental economics, with particular attention to happiness, well-being measurement, and fairness in allocation. His publications feature prominently in top-tier journals. Select works include "A New Well-Being Atomism" (with Daniel Weltman) in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2023), "The Usefulness of Well-Being Temporalism" in Journal of Economic Methodology (2023), "Well-Being Coherentism" in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2022), "No Theory-Free Lunches in Well-Being Policy" in The Philosophical Quarterly (2020), "Procedural Fairness in Exchange Matching Systems" in Journal of Business Ethics (2023), "Allocative Fairness" (with Tom Rowe) in Philosophy Compass (2025), and "The Need for Governmental Inefficiency in Plato's Republic" in Journal of the History of Economic Thought (2021). He has contributed chapters such as "Lotteries, Queues, and Bottlenecks" (with Tom Rowe) in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 10 (2024). Currently, Hersch is authoring a book on procedural allocative fairness. He serves as Faculty Editor for The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Review, has published an op-ed on highway use fees in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (2024), and presents on well-being policy and fairness at seminars and conferences.