Alastair Norcross  Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy. Norcross graduated from Oxford University in 1983 and earned his Ph.D. at Syracuse University in 1991 under the supervision of Jonathan Bennett. While finishing his degree, he also taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY from 1990 to 1992. He then taught for ten years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, before moving to Rice University in 2002. He joined the Colorado faculty in 2007. In ethics, Norcross defends a version of act utilitarianism known as "scalar utilitarianism", which is the theory that there are no right or wrong actions, only better or worse actions ranked along a continuum from the action (or actions) that contributes most to overall utility to the action (or actions) that contributes the least.