Dr. Jessica J.T. Fischer

Personal information

I am a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at the Chair for Practical Philosophy and Ethics. Before that, I pursued a research fellowship at the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt and completed my PhD in Philosophy at University College London.

My research takes place in the fields of normative ethics and political philosophy. It investigates the commonly accepted belief that, when costs are equal, we ought to bring about more good rather than less good. The belief that we have such a pro tanto duty to maximize the good underwrites not only many consequentialist and non-consequentialist moral theories, but also a large range of popular approaches in public policy. My work suggests that a pro tanto duty to maximize the good is less attractive and more controversial than generally assumed, and fails to accurately reflect a number of our common-sense moral judgements.

Selected publications

• The Individualist Objection: or Why Ex Ante Probabilities Aren’t Always Individualistic, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol. 12, 2022.
• Counting People and Making People Count, Philosophy, 96 (2), 2021, pp. 229-252.

Selected talks

• ‘Aggregation, Maximization, and Policymaking’ (Society for Applied Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, 2022)
• ‘The Separateness of Persons Reconsidered’ (Early Career Conference on “Relational Normativity”, University of Zurich, 2022)
• ‘The Non-Identity Intuition and Moral Arbitrariness’ (2nd NYU Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, NYU, 2022)
• ‘The Individualist Objection’ (Workshop in Normative Ethics, University of Arizona, 2021)
• ‘On Doing Less Good’ (CEPPA Graduate Conference, University of St Andrews, Feb 2019)
• ‘A Defense of Ex Ante Contractualism’ (Junior Scholars Workshop, Stanford University, June 2018)