Selim Berker

Selim Berker is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works on the foundations of normativity in all of its guises, including the normative assessment of action (in ethics), of belief (in epistemology), and—increasingly—of emotions (in moral psychology and aesthetics). He is also interested in more general issues in metaphysics connected to grounding, explanation, and dependence, often—but not always—with an eye toward their application in normative contexts. His primary research project at the moment involves questioning the assumption that we can divide up the normative categories into two major families: “the right” and “the good.” As he sees it, there is a third major family of normative categories, “the fitting,” with its own distinctive structural features and its own distinctive basis. Categories in this family include the merited, the apt, the warranted, the justified, and the called for, as well as response-involving properties such as the admirable, the blameworthy, the delightful, the interesting, and the tiresome. He is also working on the relation between reasons-to and reasons-why, on the prospects for question-oriented approaches in ethics and epistemology, and on the metaphysics of voting.