Hugo Adam Bedau

Hugo Adam Bedau (born September 23, 1926) is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Tufts University, and is best known for his work on capital punishment. He has been called a "leading anti-death-penalty scholar" by Stuart Taylor Jr., who has quoted Bedau as saying "I'll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they'd sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."^[1]

Bedau gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1961 and subsequently taught at Dartmouth College, Princeton University and Reed College before joining Tufts in 1966. He retired in 1999.^[2] Bedau is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union,^[3] for whom he has written on the death penalty.^[4]

He is author of The Death Penalty in America (1st edition, 1964; 4th edition, 1997). On the occasion of Bedau's retirement, Norman Daniels said of The Death Penalty in America: "It is the premier example in this century of the systematic application of academic philosophical skills to a practical issue, and the flood of work in practical ethics that has followed can rightfully cite Hugo's work as its starting point".^[3]

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

External links

• Homepage at Tufts University at the Wayback Machine (archived February 23, 2008).
• Faculty Profile at Tufts University

Persondata
Name	Bedau, Hugo Adam
Alternative names
Short description	American philosopher and death penalty scholar
Date of birth	September 23, 1926
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death