I am a doctoral student at the University of St Andrews, jointly supervised by Theron Pummer (Philosophy) and Miguel Costa-Gomes (Economics) funded by the SASP studentship. My Ph.D. thesis is titled 'Moral Decision-Making: Essays from Philosophy and Economics.' I intend to finish my Ph.D. in late 2022 or early 2023.
From 2021-2022 I am also a Global Priorities Fellow at the Forethought Foundation and a Oskar Morgenstern Fellow at the Mercatus Center. My research spans philosophy, economics, and psychology, though it mostly employs experimental methods. In my doctoral research, I broadly work on the topics of moral decision-making from both philosophy (first three chapters) and economics (last three chapters) based approaches. My general research is highly inter- and multidisciplinary and focuses in large part on Effective Altruism and global priorities research. It draws on a number of methods (experimental social science, philosophical analysis, historical investigations) and touches on questions from several fields. My research has been supported by grants and awards from the Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, and Giving What We Can. It has the following distinct strands: 1) Effective Charitable Giving In this area of my research, I study individual donor behaviour in a lab context. My work so far has investigated the effect of moral demandingness, the role that expert advice plays in charitable giving under normative uncertainty, and the importance of individual differences in donation decisions between highly reliable and very risky charitable interventions. 2) Psychology of Population Ethics/Existential Risk In the papers in this area of research, I am specifically interested in preferences and behaviours relating to population ethics and existential risk. In the past, I have analysed the role that dark triad personality traits play in anti-natalist views and how reflective equilibrium reasoning plays out in the context of population ethics. I have also contributed to the introduction a reliable and valid scale to measure anti-natalist views. |
3) Metascience
I also work on improving (social) science, having argued for the adoption of the Bayesian Truth Serum to properly incentivise experimental participant behaviour in experimental philosophy. In more current work, I am replicating previous work in the hopes of being able to recommend the Bayesian Truth Serum more widely, while also arguing for a structural rethinking of the academic paper system in aid of a progressive and cumulative science. 4) Other I have a significant number of further research across a number of disciplines and topics that range from work on political power in John Locke, the epistemic similarities between market liberals and feminism, to the psychology of the COVID responses, the ethics of research in a pandemic, and the use of causal language in the health literature. |
For further details on all past and present research projects, please visit Research. For my full Curriculum Vitae, please visit CV. You can contact me at: contact.schoenegger@gmail.com You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/SchoeneggerPhil |