Aaron James

Aaron James is a professor of philosophy at UC Irvine with a doctorate from Harvard, and a lifelong surfer, and both facts surface in his books. Assholes: A Theory, published by Doubleday in 2012, does to the type what analytic philosophy does to any concept: it defines him precisely, as a man who takes special advantages in social life systematically, out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunises him against the complaints of everyone else, and then asks what a decent society can actually do about him. It became a bestseller and drew a sequel about Donald Trump. His other work is more conventional: Fairness in Practice, on the ethics of the global economy, and Surfing with Sartre.