Having completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge, I have embarked on a 5 year post-doctoral fellowship at the Polonsky Academy of Advanced Study at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
My main area of research is in ethics, both normative and applied.
In normative ethics, I work primarily on supererogation. Supererogatory actions are those that go above and beyond the call of duty. In my work on supererogation, I examine both the conditions that an act must meet to be counted as supererogatory as well as the value of including this class of normative action in our ethical theories. Often overlooked in the traditional ethical discussions of liars, murderers, promise-breakers and thieves, I focus on the wonderfully positive side of our moral lives and encourage us all to take more seriously those modest gift-givers, blood-donors, saints and heroes who similarly populate our moral world.
In applied ethics, I work on the ethics of technology, specifically of technologies of virtuality and artificiality. I examine the ethical status of these technologies and their products as well as the potential that they have to challenge our current ethics and its application, by demanding the creation of new principles to govern behaviour or even changes to our conceptual framework. Within my project, I focus on three topics: virtual child pornography; artificial agents; and virtual reality.
For more, the section on my current research.
