Malcolm Morano
Research Interests: Ethics (especially Metaethics and Moral Psychology); Existentialism; Political Philosophy; and the History of Ethics and Political Philosophy.
My dissertation develops a theory of what the question of "the meaning of life" is a question about, why we ask it, and how our answers to it (or lack thereof) are related to our deepest ethical commitments. In particular, I argue that concerns about life's meaning are concerns about how to understand our lives in a way that will guide us in living them. I then try to show how this framework helps us to grapple with an important shift in ethical understandings that came about with modernity—the shift to a liberal individualist conception of meaning, which seeks these justificatory understandings at much smaller scales than prior worldviews—and the pathologies that may arise from this approach to meaning-making.
I am also interested in developing the political implications of this framework. One consequence of an ethical culture which tends to seek justificatory understandings only at the smaller scales of individual activities is that an increasing number of people will fall through the ethical cracks. These people will not find sufficiently convincing ways to understand and justify the suite of activities they find themselves doing in our society. This can lead to a number of political pathologies, primarily (i) the erosion of rich conceptions of the good in favor of a retreat to simple hedonic ends, on the one hand, and (ii) the embrace of illiberal worldviews that promise to give life a more totalizing sense of coherence and direction, on the other. These tendencies reveal a gap in many of the accounts of political liberalism (e.g., from John Rawls or Judith Shklar) and suggest that, if a liberal culture is to successfully reproduce itself, it must be able to offer its citizens a more holistic understanding of a liberal way of life. I believe that the project of forging such an understanding was advanced most in the writings of John Dewey, and I hope to pursue this line of thought in future work.
I received a BA in Philosophy and Music from Fordham University in 2014, and joined the Harvard Philosophy Department in 2018.