What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I will be working on the Norwegian Research Council-funded project “Salient Solutions: Responding Ethically to the Attention Crisis”, which takes up questions about the nature of attention norms and ethical issues that emerge from the shaping of attention by outside actors. For example, social media platforms like Facebook engineer our attention through the use of algorithms that deliver tailor-made content and advertisements to users. Part of my work on the project will focus on the extent to which such activities are morally acceptable: Are they manipulative? Do they improperly commodify our attention? Is there an ethically-acceptable way of regulating them? I will also investigate the ethics of the use of so-called nudges in public policy and the role that attention norms play in collective action.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
My research interests are in ethics (especially biomedical ethics), social philosophy, and philosophy of economics. My research is practically-oriented and interdisciplinary, and addresses contemporary ethical and public policy issues with tools from philosophy, economics, game theory, and biology.
A chief theme in my research is the tension between cooperation and rational self-interest, and how to reconcile—both normatively and practically—the pursuit of individual interests with the collective good. At the normative level, I am interested in the extent to which cooperation can be rationally justified. At the practical level, I am interested in the mechanisms that generate and sustain cooperation and apply those findings to emerging ethical and policy issues. I have previously done work that compares the ethical implications of the classical incentive and sanction structures used to motivate individuals with nudges and novel empirically-informed approaches to generating cooperation. I am looking forward to extending and applying this work to the areas of focus of Salient Solutions.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
In my spare time I enjoy horseback riding, cycling (indoors and out), and populating Instagram with pictures of my cat Bjørn. Pre-pandemic, I enjoyed traveling and am looking forward to once again being able to do so.