Jussi Suikkanen has been awarded an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow award for a project called Building Bridges in Ethics: Connecting Normative Ethics and Metaethics.
The AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow award is a prestigious grant (£134.000 for 18 months). According to AHRC, the scheme "provides time for research leaders, or potential future research leaders, to undertake focused individual research alongside collaborative activities which have the potential to generate a transformative impact on their subject area and beyond. In addition to demonstrating support for high quality, world leading research and associated outputs, proposals must include collaborative activities to support the development of the Fellow’s capacity for research leadership in the arts and humanities."
Suikkanen's project will focus on the connection between ethical theories in normative ethics and metaethical theories. Can we discover in normative ethics which actions are right by investigating metaethical questions about moral language and thought? Should our moral views influence how we understand the meaning of moral terms or the nature of ethical properties? Or, should moral philosophers investigate normative ethics and metaethics separately? The project aims to establish that the two fields are intertwined. Suikkanen is currently writing a book on the subject, provisionally entitled Building Bridges in Ethics - a Theory of Metaethics and Normative Ethics. He will also organise two international workshops on the methods of ethics with the help of the award.