SUPPORTING RESEARCH
my fellowship year, I had the opportunity to present my work at several venues beyond the GPF seminar. I gave a talk at a conference at Bates College, my undergraduate alma mater, last fall and presented at my department’s Dissertation Seminar this spring. This past academic year, I was also a Graduate Student Fellow in the Program in Cognitive Science and presented my work at the Lunchtime Talk Series. In addition, I published an article in the Maryland Law Review that explored the constitutionality of neuroscience-based lie detection. This summer, I will be participating in the Bioethics Boot Camp, which is a three-week intensive program in medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. The Graduate Prize Fellowship has given me the unique opportunity to present my work to a truly interdisciplinary audience and receive feedback from a variety of intellectual perspectives. I am grateful to the UCHV for the chance to engage with, and learn from, such an interesting and diverse group of graduate students.
Adam Lerner Being a Graduate Prize Fellow this year has afforded me a number of excellent opportunities, the most salient of which has been the ability to devote most of my time to working on my dissertation, “Empathy, Moral Epistemology, and Moral Progress.” In the dissertation, I argue that empathy plays a crucial role in moral theorizing and that appreciating this role helps us resolve a number of debates regarding our obligations to future generations, foreigners, and nonhuman animals. In addition to making significant progress on five of six chapters, I also planned two studies designed to test key empirical claims I make in the dissertation. Besides working on my dissertation, I found time this year to write a paper entitled “The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation.” In this paper, I argue that it is rational to desire to do the right thing as such (and not merely, e.g., in order to avoid punishment), and that none of the leading views in meta-
ethics can accommodate this fact. When not working directly on my own research this year, I attended philosophy graduate seminars on mental fragmentation, bias and objectivity, non-consequentialist moral theories, and dissertation work in progress. Being a Graduate Prize Fellow also allowed me to participate in a number of fantastic UCHV activities, including the Graduate Prize Fellow seminar, the DeCamp Bioethics Seminar series, the Princeton Workshop in Normative Philosophy, and the Philosophy and Climate Change Conference. Beyond the UCHV, I regularly attended meetings of the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab and events hosted by the Princeton Program in Cognitive Science.
Beth Stroud Over the past year, the UCHV fellowship provided me with an intellectual community that supported my progress on my dissertation, “A Loftier Race: Liberal Protestantism and Eugenics, 1877–1930.” 33