Virginia Held, American philosopher, received her PhD in philosophy from Columbia University and is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. In addition to working as a reporter, she has also taught at Barnard College, Dartmouth College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yale University. She is the author of numerous scholarly books and journal articles in the areas of social and political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. In particular, she has contributed to our understanding of the moral importance of birth and mothering, to debates on limits on markets, to discussions on collective responsibility, and to the literature on moral methodology and metaethics.

According to Held, moral theorizing requires paying attention to actual moral experience. In Rights and Goods, Held argued for a view she calls "experimental morality," a version...