Andrew M. Flescher is an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine specializing in Religion, Ethics, and Medical Humanities at State University of New York, Stony Brook. There, he teaches ethics in the Medical School, co-directs and teaches in a Masters program in Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, serves on the Organ and Tissue Donor Council and the University Hospital Ethics committee, and teaches courses in Philosophy, Religious Studies, and English.
He was previously (2000-2009) Associate Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Society at California State University, Chico, where he served as the director for the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics for five years (2001-2006). He received his B.A. in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and History from Duke University (1991) and his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2000) in Religious Studies from Brown University.
He has published articles and book reviews in the Journal of Religion, Journal of Religion and Society, Dialogue and Alliance, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, among others. He is the author of two books: Heroes, Saints, and Ordinary Morality (Georgetown University Press, 2003), which examines modern and contemporary Christian sources and moral exemplars in comparative context with secular and Jewish sources and exemplars from the same time periods, and The Altruistic Species: Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious Perspectives of Human Benevolence, co-authored with Daniel L. Worthen (Templeton Press, 2007), which attempts to account for why human selflessness is more frequent and conspicuous than that encountered in the animal kingdom, where altruism is attributable exclusively to traditional theories from evolutionary biology such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The Altruistic Species investigates the many senses in which altruism is biologically, psychologically, rationally and medically tied to human flourishing and develops what may loosely be characterized as an "Aristotelian" theory of human altruism. Currently Dr. Flescher is writing his third book, Four Models of Moral Evil, again under contract with Georgetown University Press, arguing from descriptive and normative grounds for the adoption of an Augustinian conception of moral evil against three other rival models. Four Models of Moral Evil ties Augustine's conception of evil as privation — an absence of compassion and goodness — to a certain sort of virtue ethic that encourages altruistic habit-forming.