Murphy-Philosophy Seminar: Johanna Jauernig (Center for Ethics)

Johanna Jauernig is a 2024-2025 Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and has a background in philosophy, experimental economics, and moral psychology. Her research is rooted in the idea that understanding both the incentive structures and the cognitive mechanisms behind moral attitudes is crucial for the ethical analysis of societal problems. With this approach, she addresses topics such as market skepticism, moral narratives in housing and land-use discourse, and the societal impacts of disruptive technologies. 

After graduating with a degree in philosophy and psychology from the University of Munich, she obtained her doctorate degree at the Technical University of Munich, TUM School of Management. Her dissertation, which received the Max-Weber-Prize for Business Ethics, consists of experiments on competition and anti-social behavior and a reflection on the use of economic experiments in ethics. Her articles have appeared in journals like Public Choice, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Economic Psychology, and Philosophy and Technology. In her current research projects, she investigates the psychological mechanisms that drive people’s perception of markets and explores the concept of moral dysfunction in policy discourse.

Organized by the Tulane Philosophy Department, the Murphy-Philosophy Seminars are a series of workshops where CE Faculty Fellows and distinguished guest speakers present works in progress on ethics, political philosophy, political theory, moral psychology, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Papers are distributed one week beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.