Carl Elliott grew up in Clover, South Carolina, where his father was a family doctor and his mother was a librarian. He attended Davidson College, the Medical University of South Carolina and Glasgow University in Scotland, training first in medicine and then in philosophy. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Chicago, in the Bioethic Centre at the University of Otago in New Zealand (1990-91) and the University of Natal Medical School in South Africa, he joined the faculty at McGill University in Montreal. Elliott moved to the University of Minnesota in 1997 to join the Center for Bioethics. He is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy.

Elliott is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress, a resident fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Mother Jones and The American Scholar. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; the University of Sydney; and a William Evans Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago, where he is currently an affiliate of the Bioethics Centre. He and his wife, Ina, have three children and live in Minneapolis.