Dr Joanna Demaree-Cotton

Joanna is a Research Fellow in Moral Psychology at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. She is also a Fulford Fellow at Somerville 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 to explore implications of this for normative questions in philosophical ethics. Recently, she has been working on a project on the folk concept of valid consent, which examines the role of the concepts of autonomy and consent in ordinary moral reasoning, and considers implications of these findings for applied questions in the ethics of consent. Other topics of research 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; and others. 

Joanna joined the Uehiro Centre 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.