Research
Current research projects: overview
My research interests span a broad range of topics. My main philosophical contributions to date are in political philosophy, and on the topic of political legitimacy, in particular, and in social and political epistemology. I have also written on topics in the philosophy of economics and on justice in health (see my list of publications). More recently, I have started to work on issues in moral philosophy, including meta-ethics. Here I describe my ongoing and most recent research projects.
Political philosophy: democracy and political legitimacy
I have written extensively on political legitimacy. I am interested in the question of what, if anything, justifies democracy. I have published a book on Democratic Legitimacy and I am the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Political Legitimacy”.
My new book on The Grounds of Political Legitimacy (OUP 2023) explores the normative foundations of conceptions of political legitimacy. I started this project when I held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2010/11 on "The Normativity of Legitimacy".
Political philosophy: the digital public sphere
Building on my research in political philosophy on political legitimacy, democracy, and well-ordered political debate, this impact-focused project develops a new normative model for the news media, which we call the co-creational model. The co-creational news media model shows how public participation can support the production and dissemination of high-quality news and information (Heawood and Peter 2023).
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I have previously been involved in an AHRC-funded collaborative research project on Norms for the New Public Sphere (2019 - 2022), working with Rowan Cruft (Stirling), Jonathan Heawood (Public Interest News Foundation), and others. The project explored the norms that can underpin the regulation of social media platforms in relation to their increasingly important role in political debate.
Political epistemology: procedural epistemic norms and values
In my work on democratic theory, I explored epistemic proceduralism – the idea that the epistemic value of democracy depends on procedural values such as willingness to subject your views to scrutiny and uptake of other points of view, not (just) on an ability to track the right decision.
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More recently, I explored the procedural epistemic value of deliberation. I’ve also written on procedural (and substantive) epistemic norms of political deliberation in my book on The Grounds of Political Legitimacy.
Normative theory: reasons and fittingness
My current research primarily focuses on a set of issues in moral philosophy, including in meta-ethics, and normative theory. The overarching aim is to develop an ethics of fittingness.
One strand of this research explores the limitations of “reasons-first” normative theories and the relation between normative reasons and fittingness. This research explores questions such as the following. Are reasons fundamental normative facts? Is there a tension between the normativity of reasons and the normativity of fittingness?
Moral philosophy: moral affordances
Another strand of this research in moral philosophy focuses on moral affordances, which I interpret as opportunities for fitting action.
This project draws on the psychological literature on affordances. Affordances are commonly interpreted as opportunities for action. I draw on this body of research to gain new insights into moral perception and moral action.
Moral philosophy: relational ethics
A third strand explores fittingness in a context of relational ethics. How should we understand relational moral demands? And can fittingness play a foundational role in relational ethics?
Past research projects:
Health equity: what makes social inequalities in health unjust?
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Philosophy of economics (on rational choice and consent and on social choice theory): what are the conditions for meaningful economic or democratic agency?
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Political equality and human rights: what does the right to political participation entail?
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Normative uncertainty: does normative uncertainty affect what counts as acting for good reasons?
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Epistemology of disagreement: how much trust should you place in your own epistemic faculties, and how much should you trust others?