Niels de Haan

Since 2022, I work as a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. I am currently a Research Associate (2022-2028) at the African Centre for Epistemology & Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. I am an editor at Journal of Social Ontology. And I am further the PI of the FWF-Project 'The Ethics of Blaming and Praising Group Agents'. See https://ethicsofblamingpraisinggroupagents.univie.ac.at/.

Before my current position, I worked as a post-doc in the ERC Project 'The Normative and Moral Foundations of Group Agency' from 2021 to 2022 at the University of Vienna. In 2021, I completed my PhD in Philosophy with honors at the University of Vienna. My supervisor was Prof. Hans Bernhard Schmid, and my review committee consisted of Prof. Deborah Tollefsen and Prof. Gunnar Björnsson. Before this, I did my Bachelor and Research Master in Philosophy at the University of Groningen.

In my research, I primarily focus on normative ethics, social ontology, and political philosophy. I am especially interested in how to understand our normative judgments about various types of groups within political and moral theory. I focus on questions such as whether groups can be moral agents, whether they can have moral duties; and whether they can be morally responsible in their own right. I am further working on normative issues within political philosophy, especially within liberal egalitarianism, such as duties to promote just institutions, dissent, representation, and legitimacy. A recurring theme in my research is to show the importance of groups and collective action contexts for our moral and political theorizing. I am further interested in business ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action.

For more information, please see: https://sites.google.com/view/niels-de-haan/homepage.