Brian Boyd

*Note: This is the bio that was used on the Lab’s site during the fellowship year (2021–22). There may be newer versions available.

Brian Boyd is a doctoral candidate in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame. His interest in the way that personal virtue and communal flourishing are impacted by social structures has led him to focus on economic justice, with particular attention to wages and property rights. Drawing on economics, history, and sociology, his work seeks to describe the situations we face, judge what is lacking from the perspective of integral human development, and offer pathways towards action for justice. Boyd’s dissertation on the just wage details the commutative, distributive, and social aspects involved in truly equal exchanges of labor for capital, showing the constrained possibility of offering just wages under the conditions of global capitalism.

Boyd also studies the ethics of science and technology and serves as a consultant for the policy journal The New Atlantis. As a concurrent graduate fellow of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, he is writing a chapter on information technology for the forthcoming textbook Love & Accounting: A Christian Virtue Ethics Approach to Work and Social Justice at Home and in the Professions.    

Boyd has earned a B.A. and M.T.S. from the University of Notre Dame, a B.A. from the University of Oxford, and has studied at Georgetown University and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum). He is a Doctoral Student Affiliate of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, a Sorin Fellow of the Center for Ethics and Culture, and a member of the Society for Christian Ethics and the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry.