Roles and subjects
Hugh Price Fellow in Philosophy
Contact
Academic Background
Joanna received her B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Oxford, winning the Gibbs Prizes for Philosophy and Experimental Psychology in her cohort. She subsequently completed her B.Phil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford before receiving her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University. During her PhD, she was awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship for studying ethical values from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (now the Institute for Citizens and Scholars). Returning to the University of Oxford in 2022, Joanna is currently a Research Fellow in Moral Psychology at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and an Honorary Member of the Department of Experimental Psychology. In 2024 she was awarded a Knowledge Frontiers grant from the British Academy for her project “Gendered Conceptions of Autonomous Consent”.
Undergraduate Teaching
- Moral Psychology
- Ethics
Postgraduate Teaching
Joanna supervises students working on topics in experimental philosophy, moral psychology, and ethics. She also teaches empirical research methods for philosophy and ethics students.
Research Interests
Joanna’s research focuses on various questions at the intersection of ethics and psychology. She uses interdisciplinary methods from analytic philosophy and empirical psychology to investigate the psychological underpinnings of moral judgments, moral concepts, and moral agency and to explore the implications of this for normative questions in philosophical ethics. Recently, she has been working on a project on the folk concept of valid consent, which examines the role of the concepts of autonomy and consent in ordinary moral reasoning and considers the implications of these findings for applied questions in the ethics of consent. Other topics of research include the effects of framing and nudges on autonomy and valid consent; blame and moral responsibility, especially in contexts of impaired agency; the implications of psychology and neuroscience for moral epistemology and moral debunking; moral intuitions and metaphilosophy; the psychology and ethics of moral dilemmas; and others.
Hobbies
In her spare time, Joanna loves gardening, playing board games, cooking, and cuddling with her cat.
Links
Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College:
- Mathematics and Philosophy
- Philosophy and Theology
- Philosophy and Modern Languages
- Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE)
- Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics
See also Dr Demaree-Cotton’s Departmental profile and Faculty of Philosophy website.