Dr. Daniel Sharp

Personal information

Daniel Sharp is an assistant professor (akademischer Rat auf Zeit) at LMU at the Chair of Philosophy and Political Theory. He completed his PhD in Philosophy at New York University in 2022. Before beginning his PhD, he was a fellow at NIH Bioethics and a Fulbright scholar in Vienna, Austria.

Research interests

Although Daniel has diverse interests in ethics and political philosophy, much of his recent research concerns migration, citizenship, equality, and democratic theory. One strand of his research explores how current practices of migration governance create problematically inegalitarian social relationships between persons both within and between states. Based on his diagnosis of the egalitarian problems with contemporary migration governance, he explores how institutions regulating global mobility might be re-imagined to facilitate, rather than hinder, equal social relations between persons.

A second project concerns citizenship. In this project, he develops a systematic normative theory of the point and purpose of citizenship as a legal status and uses this theory to shed light on a range of philosophical questions about citizenship and citizenship policy. He is working on a book manuscript that answers this question, provisionally entitled "The Moral Foundations of Citizenship". The book offers a pluralist defense of citizenship as a political ideal that is sensitive to the deeply inegalitarian nature of actual citizenship regimes and how citizenship must be transformed to achieve its central normative functions.

A third project concerns the nature of our obligations to refugees. In this project, he explores the philosophical foundations of our duties to refugees as well as various applied questions that arise in refugee protection, such as the ethics of leveraging migrants in interstate bargaining, how states should respond to migration blackmail, and how externalization policies undermine self-determination of states in the Global South.

A fourth area of interest is democratic theory. Most notably, he has written together with Katharina Anna Sodoma on political polarization, its impact on democracy, and the role of empathy in democratic politics. A final dimension of his work concerns equality. In a series of papers, he articulates and defends a 'relational egalitarian' view of the value of equality and explore its implications in a range of domains. A full list of his publications can be found on his CV below.

Selected publications

• What’s Wrong with Social Hierarchy? On Niko Kolodny’s The Pecking Order, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2024): 129-137.