 Mathieu Doucet
Assistant Professor
PhD, Queen's University
MA, Queen’s University
BA, University of King's College
Office: HH 328
Extension: 32824
Email: mdoucet@uwaterloo.ca
Web page: (coming soon)
Areas of Interest
Ethics, Moral Psychology, Action Theory,
Political Philosophy, and Bioethics
Academic Biography
My Masters thesis was a project in the sociology of philosophical knowledge that explored the ways in which philosophical arguments and positions are shaped and develop through the course of face-to-face debate. This project gave me an abiding fascination with the question period of philosophy talks.
My doctoral dissertation, Between Virtue and Vice: Moral Worth for the Rest of Us, is a project in moral psychology. In it, I argue that flawed, imperfect agents can act in morally praiseworthy ways, a position that seems obvious and yet also seems ruled out by some influential accounts of moral psychology, and particularly those that emphasize the importance of the virtues to moral worth. I therefore argue that failures such as weakness of will, hypocrisy, and self-deception are consistent with acting in morally praiseworthy ways.
I also have an interest in bioethics, and particularly in the ethical dimensions of pharmaceutical research and marketing. The influence of pharmaceutical companies in the funding, design, and conduct of clinical trials has blurred the lines between research and marketing in ways that are morally troubling. This interest in the ethical implications of the ways in which pharmaceutical companies manufacture and deploy scientific knowledge has led to co-authored work with Sergio Sismondo.
Selected Publications
"Can we be self-deceived about what we believe? Self-knowledge, self-deception, and rational agency", European Journal of Philosophy (2011)
"Publication ethics and the ghost-management of medical publication" (Sergio Sismondo and Mathieu Doucet) Bioethics 24: 10 (July 2010) pp. 273-283
“Evaluating solutions to sponsorship bias” (Mathieu Doucet and Sergio Sismondo) Journal of Medical Ethics 34 (2008) pp. 627-30
Selected Grants, Fellowships & Awards
2009: C.G. Prado Thesis Prize, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University
2009: OGS Doctoral Award
2006-2008: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
2005: A.R.C. Duncan Award for Excellence on Tutoring
Current Research
I am particularly interested in the normative aspects of moral psychology. That is to say, I am interested in understanding the ways that a person’s desires, beliefs, motives, intentions, emotions, deliberations, and dispositions—in sum, their practical rationality—can be assessed as either morally worthy or as liable to moral criticism.
In exploring these issues, I am committed to the idea that our moral standards should be constrained by facts about people as we actually find them, and so our standards of virtue should not demand the impossible. This means that my research, though not itself empirical, is sympathetic to empirically-minded approaches to moral psychology. But I also think that the most interesting normative questions remain once the empirical results are in, and the main aim of my research is to answer these questions.
I am currently at work on three projects. The first two are closely connected—I am exploring the moral status of hypocrisy, which I argue is related to a kind of failure of self-knowledge, and I am therefore also exploring the connection between moral failures and failures of self-knowledge more generally. The third project evaluates the plausibility of various solutions to the so-called numbers problem (roughly, the question of whether we should save the lives of a greater number of people rather than a smaller number when we cannot save both). I object to several of the proposed solutions on the grounds that they seem to make doing the right thing far too difficult for rationally constrained agents like us.
Graduate Supervision and Teaching
Graduate courses:
- Fall 2009: Harry Frankfurt
- Winter 2011: Weakness of Will
PhD Theses:
- The Ethics of Nuclear Waste in Canada (Committee member)
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