I’m a professor at Princeton University, in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Human Values. I am Director of Early-Career Research at the Center for Human Values, providing career development and placement support to our graduate student fellows and postdocs. I edit a book series for Princeton University press, Insights: Short Works of Philosophy. Along with Elisabeth Camp and Jill North, I created and run the Athena in Action Networking and Mentoring Workshops for Graduate Student Women in Philosophy; the sixth workshop will happen in June 2024 at University of Notre Dame.
I’ve been interviewed about my work on abortion (video) and about my work on the ethics of treating deafness in babies (video).
Here’s my CV.
I write on a wide range of topics within moral philosophy. I have five overlapping research projects.
I’m writing a book, When To Be a Hero, about actions above and beyond what morality requires. I argue that some of these actions are such that we should perform them, so we’d be making a moral mistake if we failed to perform them, though we wouldn’t be doing anything morally wrong. Recognizing that there are things we should do for moral reasons that aren’t morally required and that there are morally permissible moral mistakes illuminates our moral lives in a number of ways, I argue in the book and in a series of recent papers.
One of my longstanding research projects is about moral status, harm, and the ethics of procreation. I defend the moral permissibility of early abortion and explain what duties we do and don’t have against harming fetuses and against harming in creating.
Another of my research projects is about moral ignorance and uncertainty. I argue that people who do awful things while caught in the grip of false moral views are not rendered blameless by the fact that they thought they were acting rightly. And I argue that there is no interesting question of the form: how should an agent who is morally uncertain be guided by her moral credences?
Another of my research projects is about practical reasoning, future desires, and regret. I argue that “I’ll be glad I did it, so I should do it” is often good reasoning, but fails in certain crucial cases due to our reasonable attachment to the actual. I discuss practical reasoning about transformative experiences. And I explain why we wish we could die later than we will, but we don’t wish we’d been born sooner than we were.
Finally, my research project about moral epistemology and moral methodology confronts the fact that ethics is hard. I argue that there may be an asymmetry in how testimony affects what one is justified in believing, that there is nothing wrong with “relying on intuitions” in ethics, and that failure to realize something is only sometimes exculpatory.
My writings for a general audience include an op-ed about abortion rights, an op-ed about academic freedom and racist research, and some advice columns about life in the early stages of the pandemic.
I am co-editor of two textbooks: Norton Introduction to Philosophy and Norton Introduction to Ethics.
My husband Alex Guerrero is a philosophy professor at Rutgers University.