[1] McMurtry was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in June 2001 by his peers for his work regarding the study of humanities and social sciences.
Prior to doctoral studies, he was "a professional football player, print and television journalist, academic English teacher and world-traveller".
[2] In his autobiographic article "The Human Vocation: An Autobiography of Higher Education" for the scholarly journal Nordicum-Mediterraneum,[5] McMurtry recounts the most salient moments of his formative years and states that he "came to philosophy as a last resort, because as someone naturally disposed to question unexamined assumptions and conventional beliefs, I could find no other profession which permitted this vocation at the appropriate level of research."
In Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, 2002, he criticizes capitalist scientific technology, transnational trade apparatuses, NATO wars, and an expanding prison regime as symptoms of a "new totalitarianism cumulatively occupying the world and propelling civil and ecological breakdowns", and proposes constitutional standards of a "life economy".
In one lecture, he drew comparisons to the event of the Reichstag fire and argued that the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) was lobbied for and exploited by multinational corporations.