Professor Beeghly is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Utah. Her research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. She is the author of What's Wrong With Stereotyping? (Oxford 2025) and coeditor of Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social MInd (Routledge 2020). She also writes and teaches about topics within legal theory, including discrimination law. Beeghly's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Cente…
Professor Beeghly is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Utah. Her research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. She is the author of What's Wrong With Stereotyping? (Oxford 2025) and coeditor of Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social MInd (Routledge 2020). She also writes and teaches about topics within legal theory, including discrimination law. Beeghly's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, IASH at the University of Edinburgh, the American Association for University Women, and the Townsend Center for Humanities at Berkeley.
Beeghly is currently at work on two projects. The first, Playing with Stereotypes, explores subversive and liberating uses of stereotypes. Highlighting the lived experiences of marginalized groups, the book will analyze how activists, artists, and everyday people have played with, and used, stereotypes for the purposes of pleasure, empowerment, and social protest. Far from always being unjust or wrong, I argue that stereotyping is a morally complex phenomenon, manifesting in humor, our deepest existential impulses, and powerful acts of resistance. The second project, Modelling Ethical Complexity, explores frameworks for understanding ethics beyond the three big ethical theories in Western philosophy: virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, and consequentialism. I argue that ethical kinds like wrongful stereotyping are messy -- rather than neat -- in ways that mirror the messiness of kinds in nature (Havstad 2018). Accordingly, traditional ethical theories -- all of which emphasize the "neatness" of moral reality -- cannot accurately model what's wrong with unethical treatment. I argue for modelling ethical complexity using analytical frameworks first developed by philosophers of science to characterize the complex kinds in nature (such as biological kinds). A second aspect of this project focuses on standpoint theory's implications for ethics and metaethics. It argues that standpoint theory coheres best with a pluralistic ethics -- and experiments with various forms of pluralism that have been underexplored in ethics such as taxonomic pluralism, cross-cutting taxonomies, explanatory pluralism, and normative cluster theory.
