Jeff McMahan was educated at Oxford and Cambridge and was a Research Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on a companion volume to this book that will deal with the ethics of killing in self-defense, in war, and as a mode of punishment.

With a careful application of metaphysics to ethics, McMahan has developed a field of argument that has been insufficiently explored, and in so doing, created a whole new structure for the debates surrounding abortion and euthanasia. This makes this a novel and, at times, exciting book.