Emad Atiq

Emad H. Atiq is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the Cornell Law School and the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell. He works on the nature of norms and normativity and is interested especially in how norms of different kinds--such as moral, epistemic, and legal norms--relate. He has two primary research projects at the moment. One project defends the view that epistemic norms help explain the force of moral norms: there are epistemic reasons to have affective and emotional experiences of the sort that reliably move us to comply with urgent moral imperatives, such as the principle of beneficence. This account leverages a theory of how perceptual awareness grounds knowledge. Another project explores the role of moral reasoning and moral deference in legal interpretation. He argues that when deferring to the moral judgments of future agents is rational, it justifies independent moral reasoning in interpreting constitutional and other legal texts written by prior generations. Apart from these projects, he continues to write on the nature of perceptual awareness, empathy, decision-making under uncertainty, jurisprudence, and private law theory.