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Cornell University

Moral Psychology @ Cornell

NEH Summer Institute 2024

Visiting Faculty


Jesse Graham

Jesse Graham is the George S. Eccles Chair in Business Ethics, Professor of Management, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. Jesse studies the moral, political, and religious convictions that cause so much conflict — within and between individuals and organizations — and yet provide so much meaning to people’s lives.

Joshua D. Greene

Joshua D. Greene is Professor of Psychology and a member of the Center for Brain Science faculty at Harvard University. Originally trained as a philosopher, Greene began his scientific career with behavioral and neuroscientific research on moral judgment, focusing on the interplay between emotion and reason in moral dilemmas. His current social scientific research examines strategies for improved social decision-making, including the reduction of political animosity and increasing the impact of charitable giving. His current neuroscientific research aims to understand the “language of thought,” and how the brain combines concepts to form complex ideas. Other research and teaching focuses on the development of safe and beneficial artificial intelligence. Greene is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Rachana Kamtekar

Rachana Kamtekar studies ancient philosophy — primarily ethics, politics, and moral psychology — but also has substantial interests in contemporary moral psychology. Her monograph, Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and Desire for Good (OUP) was published in 2017, and she is currently working on two projects: the relationship between action and character across ancient ethics, and ancient conceptions of causation in relation to responsibility and explanation.

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, moral theory, and evolution. He turned his dissertation into a book on the genetic and cultural evolution of disgust called Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, (Bradford Books, 2011) has published on a range of topics that include moral judgment, moral progress, climate change, social norms, and norm-guided activity, the psychology of group membership, racial cognition, implicit bias and responsibility, cross-cultural diversity, and David Foster Wallace and free will.  Kelly was recently a visiting scholar in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at Holland College at KU Leuven and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Much of Kelly’s recent work has been exploring ways to apply the insights of the cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences to social issues like climate change, misinformation and polarization, and systemic injustice. He is currently co-authoring a public-facing book that explores how those insights can be used to integrate individual and structural approaches to social change.

Tania Lombrozo

Tania Lombrozo is the Arthur W. Marks ‘19 Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, as well as an Associate of the Department of Philosophy and of the University Center for Human Values. She previously served as a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, conceptual representation, categorization, social cognition, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology. She is the recipient of numerous early-career awards including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She has blogged about psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science at Psychology Today and for NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture.

Edouard Machery

Edouard Machery is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published more than 150 articles and chapters on these topics in leading philosophical and scientific venues. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (OUP, 2009) and of Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds (OUP, 2017) as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012), La Philosophie Expérimentale (Vuibert, 2012), Arguing about Human Nature (Routledge, 2013), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy (Routledge, 2014), and several journal special issues. His work has been cited nearly 12,000 times according to Google Scholar (h-index: 53). He is currently the President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. In recent years, he has focused on the methodological debates surrounding the replication crisis in psychology and other sciences, and he is writing a new book about whether we should trust science in light of the frailties revealed by the replication crisis.

Jennifer M. Morton

Jennifer M. Morton is Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in how poverty and social class affect our agency. She is currently working on a book on striving in the face of adversity with Sarah Paul (NYU Abu Dhabi) and a series of papers on precarity and poverty. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2019) was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellowship at the Princeton Center for Human Values.

Derk Pereboom

Derk Pereboom (PhD UCLA) is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in the Philosophy Department at Cornell University and Senior Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. His areas of research include free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, and early modern philosophy, especially Kant. He is the author of Living without Free Will (Cambridge, 2001), Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford, 2011), Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford, 2014), and Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions (Oxford, 2021). He has published articles on free will and moral responsibility, consciousness and physicalism, nonreductive materialism, and Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology.

David Pizarro

David Pizarro is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His primary research interest is in how and why humans make moral judgments, such as what makes us think that certain actions are wrong, that some actions deserve blame or praise, or that some people are good (or bad) people. In addition, he studies how emotions influence a wide variety of social judgments. These two areas of interest come together in the topic of much of his recent work, which has focused on the emotion of disgust and the role it plays in shaping moral and political judgments. In his spare time, he also co-hosts a podcast on the psychology and philosophy of ethics called Very Bad Wizards.

Chandra Sripada

Chandra Sripada is Theophile Raphael Professor, Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry, and Director of the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan. He works on issues of mind and agency that lie at the intersection of philosophy and the behavioral and brain sciences. Recent work investigates mechanisms of decision, thought, and self-control, with the aim of understanding how emerging results from the sciences impact our picture of ourselves as free, responsible, and rational agents.

David Shoemaker

David Shoemaker is a Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. His research includes work on agency and responsibility, moral psychology, humor and morality, personal identity and ethics, and political philosophy. He is the author of over 60 journal articles on these topics, as well as three monographs. He is also the series editor of Oxford Studies in Agency & Responsibility and a former associate editor at the journal Ethics. His latest book is Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), and his monograph The Architecture of Blame and Praise is under contract with Oxford University Press, expected in 2025.

Valerie Tiberius

Valerie Tiberius is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Her work explores the ways in which philosophy and psychology can both contribute to the study of well-being and virtue. She is the author of The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits (Oxford 2008), Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Others to Live Well (Oxford, 2018), Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge 2015, 2nd edition 2023), and What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters (Princeton University Press, 2023). She has published many articles on the topics of practical reasoning, prudential virtues, well-being, and moral psychology, and has received numerous grants from the Templeton Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association from 2016-17.

Manuel Vargas

Manuel Vargas is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego. He has written about a wide range of topics in philosophy, including free will, moral responsibility, philosophy of law, the history of philosophy in Mexico, and theories of social identities. Vargas is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (OUP, 2013), which won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize. With John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, and Derk Pereboom, he co-authored Four Views on Free Will (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), and the forthcoming revised and expanded second edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024). He is also the author of the forthcoming Mexican Philosophy (OUP), which explores notable episodes in the history of philosophy in Mexico. With John Doris, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (OUP, 2022) and with Gideon Yaffe, he edited Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP, 2014).

Monique Wonderly

Monique Wonderly is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego and is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to her current appointments, she held a three-year position as the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bioethics at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Her current work spans three overlapping research areas: the nature and ethics of emotional attachment, psychopathology, and moral agency, and responsibility and moral emotions. She has published in venues such as Ethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Philosophers’ Imprint. Some of her recent work addresses the type of felt necessity internal to emotional attachment, the possibility, and justification of un-forgiving (or taking back one’s forgiveness), and the structure and import of moral pride as an attitude by which one takes responsibility for one’s own morally praiseworthy conduct. She is currently working on a manuscript project on the philosophy of emotional attachment.