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. My current project is entitled: ‘Artificial Goodness: Doing and Being Good in the Digital Age’. Much of the current debate in the ethics of technology has focused on the ways in which innovations in technology provides opportunities for us to act in wrong and impermissible ways. I propose to assess, in relation to the rapidly developing technologies of artificiality, whether these innovations equally can lead to ‘real’ changes in the opportunities, means and nature of what it is to be and to do good. I propose to do this by exploring three areas, asking in each whether there really is a distinction to be drawn between doing good and ‘merely’ seeming to be good: virtual realities, robotic agents and artificial intelligence.
I have begun by examining the dark side of emerging technologies. I am currently working on a book manuscript: Virtual Child Pornography: Victims, Images, Fictions. This will allow me to assess dimensions of moral assessments when it comes to virtual images and virtual worlds. For more on this see, the section on my current research.
I am also continuing my work on supererogation, as well as branching into the related fields of blame, atonement and forgiveness.
In order to bring together people from relatively disparate areas of philosophy who work on the boundary between duty and supererogation, I am organising a workshop on ‘The Limits of Duty’, which will take place in Cambridge on the 14th of June 2013. If you would like to attend, please visit our workshop webpage.
Due to my interest in psychology and the anthropology of ethics, I am co-organising a workshop on ‘Alterity, Intersubjectivity, Ethics: Exploring Theoretical Directions for Further Study of Ethics and Morality’, which will take place in Cambridge on the 30th of September 2013. For more information, please visit our workshop webpage.
