Matthew Lindauer

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.  I was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, and I received my Ph.D. from Yale in 2015.  I specialize in moral and political philosophy, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy.  My work is animated by an interest in the role that empirical facts should play in the evaluation of normative concepts. 

On my view, moral and political philosophers should be and have often been, explicitly or implicitly, interested in the fruitfulness of these concepts – how well they help us to solve practical problems.  Notably, evaluating fruitfulness along these dimensions is partly an empirical enterprise – we have to engage with and sometimes conduct new research in the social sciences to determine the extent to which normative concepts help us to solve the practical problems they are supposed to help us solve.  I am currently writing a book on these issues, tentatively entitled The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts (under contract with Oxford University Press).

I am also interested in how political philosophy should take facts about the real world into account.  In particular, the fact that citizens and non-citizens of democratic states stand in relationships with one another, including intimate relationships and relationships of identification, generates stringent duties on these states that bear on how they treat non-citizens.  I have mostly examined these duties in the context of immigration justice, but am also interested in their implications for other topics, such as global poverty and climate change.

More generally, I hold that philosophers have an important role to play in engaging with and conducting empirical research on moral and political issues, and that traditional and empirical methods can be brought together to illuminate these issues.

Representative Publications

• “Entry by Birth Alone?: Rawlsian Egalitarianism and the Basic Right to Invite.” (2021). Social Theory and Practice, 47(2), 331-349.
• “Experimental Philosophy and the Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts.” (2020). Philosophical Studies, 177(8), 2129-2152.
• “Comparing the Effect of Rational and Emotional Appeals on Donation Behavior.” (2020). Judgment and Decision Making, 15(3), 413-420. (with Marcus Mayorga, Joshua Greene, Paul Slovic, Daniel Västfjäll, and Peter Singer)
• “The Varieties of Impartiality, or, Would an Egalitarian Endorse the Veil?” (2020). Philosophical Studies, 177(2), 459-477. (with Justin Bruner).
• “In Defense of a Category-Based System for Unification Admissions.” (2018). Journal of Moral Philosophy, 15(5), 572-598.