Current research projects
The Normative Significance of Consent
Cosent plays and important role in our lives, it often makes a crucial difference to whether or not a certain action would be morally permissible. In this project, I am developing an account of the normative significance of consent, with the aim of answering and illuminating the relations between the following questions:
Reasons and Emotions
Our emotions are subject to various forms of critical assessment. The aim of this project is to better understand these various forms of assessment, and to enquire whether emotions can be a proper object of moral evaluation in particular. One question that I am pursuing in this context is how to best make sense of the idea that we can have reasons for or against emotions, and whether that entails that emotions can be controlled through a cognitive process that qualifies as a form of reasoning.
Constructivism about Normative Reasons
What is the best way to understand and elaborate the idea that practical reasons are somehow constructed? I have tried to answer this question in Constructing Practical Reasons (OUP 2020). At the moment, I am interested in whether the constructivist account I develop in that book can be extended to other kinds of normative reasons, and whether the underlying conception of the relations between normative facts, normative judgements and the activity of reasoning is prefereable, all things considered, to alternative views.
Cosent plays and important role in our lives, it often makes a crucial difference to whether or not a certain action would be morally permissible. In this project, I am developing an account of the normative significance of consent, with the aim of answering and illuminating the relations between the following questions:
- How does consent work? By way of what "normative mechanism" does a person's consent bring it about that an action that would otherwise wrong that person does not?
- Why does consent work? What is the normative basis of our power to effect such changes in the moral status of other people's actions?
- When does consent work, and when does it not? In particlar, are there any limits to the kinds of wrongdoing that we can successfully consent to? If so, what explains these limits?
Reasons and Emotions
Our emotions are subject to various forms of critical assessment. The aim of this project is to better understand these various forms of assessment, and to enquire whether emotions can be a proper object of moral evaluation in particular. One question that I am pursuing in this context is how to best make sense of the idea that we can have reasons for or against emotions, and whether that entails that emotions can be controlled through a cognitive process that qualifies as a form of reasoning.
- This project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. You can find out more about it here.
- As part of the project, we are organizing a conference on The Ethics of Emotions: Fittingness, Fairness and Control, which will take place in July 2021.
Constructivism about Normative Reasons
What is the best way to understand and elaborate the idea that practical reasons are somehow constructed? I have tried to answer this question in Constructing Practical Reasons (OUP 2020). At the moment, I am interested in whether the constructivist account I develop in that book can be extended to other kinds of normative reasons, and whether the underlying conception of the relations between normative facts, normative judgements and the activity of reasoning is prefereable, all things considered, to alternative views.