Dr Joanna Demaree-Cotton

Joanna is a Research Fellow in Moral Psychology and Director of the Philosophical Moral Psychology lab at the Uehiro Oxford Institute. She is also a Hugh Price Fellow in Philosophy and Psychology at Jesus College and an Honorary Member of the Department of Experimental Psychology. Her research focuses on various questions at the intersection of ethics and psychology. She uses interdisciplinary methods from analytic philosophy and empirical psychology to investigate the psychological underpinnings of moral judgments, moral concepts and moral agency, and explores implications of empirical studies for normative questions in philosophical ethics. She is PI of an interdisciplinary British Academy grant which examines gender bias in concepts of autonomy and the application of principles of valid consent. Recently, she has been working on projects on the folk concept of valid consent, attributions of moral agency and responsibility, and obligations to respect the wishes of the dead. Other topics of interest include: the effects of framing and nudges on autonomy and valid consent; blame and moral responsibility, especially in contexts of impaired agency; the implications of psychology and neuroscience for moral epistemology and moral debunking; moral intuitions and metaphilosophy; the psychology and ethics of moral dilemmas. 

Joanna joined the Uehiro Oxford Institute after receiving her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University with a dissertation entitled “The Philosophy and Psychology of Valid Consent". She was also a Newcombe Fellow in the study of ethical values with the Woodrow Wilson foundation. She received her B.Phil in Philosophy and her B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Oxford. During her time at Yale, as well as conducting doctoral research, she developed an undergraduate course on the ethics of technology, and taught various undergraduate courses on applied and normative ethics, the psychology and philosophy of human nature, and introductions to the history of philosophy.