I am a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Moral and Political Philosophy. My research interests are in metaethics (especially moral epistemology), philosophy of perception, and epistemology.
I have spent the last several years working on developing a wholly perceptual account of moral knowledge, and attempting to use this account to respond to traditional epistemological objections to moral realism. I started working on these issues in my dissertation, but (as is often the case with dissertations), my ambitions were too big and thus the dissertation only ended up defending the plausibility of the broader project. So I'm now focusing on working out some of the details and applications of the theory. I am currently working on a book, co-authored with Jonna Vance on the more empirical side of a theory of moral perception, tentatively titled Virtuous Perception, Vicious World: A Defense of Moral Empiricism.
Some of this work was generously funded by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation, entitled "Moral Perception: How It Works and Why It Matters".
Aside from my main research project, I always try to keep one or two other irons in the fire to prevent burnout (and because too many things are interesting!). Recently, I've been working a bit on the metasemantic puzzles that arise for moral realists, normative ethics, and 'outsider' political philosophy.
For other research and publications, see my Research page.
I can be contacted at pjwerner1 at gmail.com
Research shows that viewing cute animals can increase performance in certain tasks. Here is my cat Mifletset:
