Prof. Irene McMullin

Personal information

Irene McMullin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, UK. She has specialisms in both Ethics (with a focus on virtue ethics and Kantian ethics) and Existential Phenomenology. She is the author of Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues (Cambridge UP, 2019) and Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations(Northwestern UP, 2013), as well as articles on Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Sartre, Arendt, moral psychology, and virtue ethics.

In 2022-23 she was a visiting Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy and Ethics, LMU, on a Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. In summer 2026, she returns to LMU on a Humboldt Alumni fellowship. Her project in summer 2026 will examine how technologically mediated modern life undermines core features of moral personhood and flourishing moral relationships. Building on her prior research on moral receptivity and trust, the project makes use of the concept of 'structural moral indifference' — introduced by Betzler & Vandieken in their 2023 article 'Moral Indifference' — to better understand how digital lifeworlds generate a condition of generalised moral disengagement. This is best understood not merely as an individual failing, but as a socially embedded and structurally maintained moral orientation. Central to the project will be the idea that patterns of interaction facilitated by modern technology are characterized by withdrawal from shared moral life, thereby eroding our capacity to receive and respond to legitimate moral claims.