Jessica Isserow

I am a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Australian National University. My dissertation addresses the question regarding what we ought to do with our moral discourse if we believe that a moral error theory is true. In it, I evaluate the answers to this question that have been proposed in the current literature, and develop my own proposal, a variety of conservationism which allows us to make do with our current erroneous moral discourse. My proposal draws upon conceptual work on the nature of belief, as well as recent empirical work in moral psychology.
 
My general research interests lie at the intersection of meta-ethics and empirically-informed moral philosophy. In other work, I explore the link between certain kinds of emotional capacities and moral competence, and the potential epistemic implications of evolutionary explanations of our moral capacities. 

Christiane Merritt

I am a PhD candidate in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. I also hold a master's degree in Philosophy from the University of Houston. 
 
My research centers on the philosophy of psychology and feminist philosophy. I'm especially interested in how psychology and neuroscience might inform our understanding of implicit biases and stereotyping. My dissertation explores the ontology of implicit biases; the harms of stereotyping; and the threat to certain accounts of free will from the neuroscience of implicit biases.

Said Saillant

I'm a PhD candidate in Philosophy at MIT, specializing in epistemology, philosophy of biology and metaethics, and I hold a BA in Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognitive Science (triple major) from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where I graduated summa cum laude.
 
My research interests are very broad, ranging from topics in epistemology and metaethics to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.  Among my currently favorite topics are skepticism, higher-order evidence, explanation, cultural evolution, extinction, and Darwinian naturalism.  My dissertation explores the relationship between knowledge, cognition, and biological fitness by examining how moral evolution theories impact our appraisal of the epistemic efficacy of moral cognition.  I argue that we don't have the empirical evidence to know that moral cognition has any tendency to bring about knowledge and that since we can't come to know whether it has such a tendency from the armchair, contrary to what we were brought up to think, we do not know there is such a thing as moral knowledge. 

Matthew Scarfone

I am a PhD candidate in Philosophy at McGill University. 

I am interested in the scope of evolutionary debunking arguments. Some think that if the scope of these arguments is too broad then they will debunk too much, giving us recourse to reject the initial arguments. Because of this worry I aim to carve out the precise scope of debunking claims. Relatedly, I am interested in companion-in-guilt arguments that aim to bridge morality and epistemology. Some think thought that the attempt to bridge these two domains supports realism about both, others think it supports anti-realism about both. I think there important and relevant differences between epistemic facts and moral facts that have been overlooked by those offering these arguments, and we may be able to debunk one domain while leaving the other unaffected.

Daniel Telech

I am a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. 

In my dissertation I provide an account of the nature and norms of the attitudes by which we praise others and ourselves— attitudes like gratitude, admiration, and pride. Since the publication of Strawson’s (1962) influential essay “Freedom and Resentment”, philosophers increasingly understand moral responsibility in terms of our susceptibility to feel a range of normative emotions—or “reactive attitudes”—in response to expressions of good and ill will. But while Strawson himself includes blaming and praising emotions among the reactive attitudes, subsequent philosophical work in this area has concentrated overwhelmingly on our practices of blame. This propensity to focus on blame to the exclusion of praise, I argue, has had the effect not only that we have imported to our conception of responsibility in general features that are in fact unique to blame; it has also commended a narrow, quasi-legalistic, moral orientation, one in which the concepts of normative demand, rights-violation, and sanction reign supreme. My aim is to remedy this. By attending to overlooked asymmetries in the ways that we evaluate praiseworthy actions and traits, my dissertation affords a richer picture of what it is to be a responsible agent. It is thus a project in praise of praise.