He attended the High School of Montreal, entered McGill University in 1968, and graduated in 1972, when he won the Prince of Wales Gold Medal in philosophy.
After taking the BPhil, Sorell wrote a thesis under the supervision of David Pears expounding and defending a version of the causal theory of knowledge.
[1] Sorell held temporary lectureships at St. Anne's, Balliol, and Queen's Colleges in Oxford in the mid-1970s before joining the philosophy department at the Open University in 1979, working alongside Rosalind Hursthouse and Janet Radcliffe Richards.
He was a Faculty Fellow in the Ethics and the Professions program at Harvard in 1996–7, and a visiting professor in philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013.
[19] His work in applied ethics is regularly pursued with practitioners: police, members of the intelligence services, technology developers, business people, medics, and policy makers.