Aaron Zimmerman was born and raised on Long Island, the son of Daniel A. Zimmerman and the Honorable Judge Hope S. Zimmerman. He attended Bowling Green Elementary School, W. Tresper Clarke High School, Tufts University and Cornell University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2002. He has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara ever since, focusing his research on moral psychology, epistemology, the history of ethics and the philosophy of mind. His first book, Moral Epistemology, was published by Routledge in 2010.