Jazmin Sidney, MSci, MA

Personal information

Jazmin Sidney is a doctoral candidate at the Research Center for Neurophilosophy and Ethics of Neurosciences. She is supervised by Stephan Sellmaier, Ophelia Deroy, and Simone Schütz-Bosbach. Her work lies at the intersection of moral philosophy, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy, with a particular focus on how we understand and evaluate one another's moral character. She previously completed an MSci in International Relations and Global Issues at the University of Nottingham and an MA in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

About the PhD project

Do we think others are truly good? According to the Good True Self theory, the answer is, surprisingly, yes. Yet despite strong support, the theory still faces objections and raises a number of unanswered questions.

My research addresses these challenges from several angles. First, I develop a more refined version of the Good True Self theory that can accommodate apparent counterexamples, explaining how we can sometimes judge others to be truly bad despite a general tendency to see them as truly good.

Second, the theory raises a further puzzle about moral evaluation. Philosophers have proposed that judgments about what others are truly like help explain blame—but how is this possible if we typically take others to be truly good? My research addresses this question by developing an account of how true-self judgments shape moral responsibility.

Finally, I extend this work into a developmental context by asking whether we see children as having true selves at all, and how this shapes our moral evaluation of their actions. I am currently investigating these questions in collaboration with Samuel Essler and Markus Paulus at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology.

Selected publications

• Sidney, J. (2026). Do we think others are truly good? Philosophical Psychology, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2026.2648683