Daniel Jacobson
Bruce D. Benson Professor of Philosophy • Director, Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization
Philosophy
daniel.jacobson@colorado.edu
Daniel Jacobson works on a range of topics in ethics, moral psychology, aesthetics, and the moral and political philosophy of J. S. Mill. He has published extensively on issues concerning sentimentalism, the philosophy of emotion, and freedom of speech. Jacobson was Project Leader of听The Science of Ethics, a three-year project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Murphy Institute at Tulane University, and the Princeton University Center for Human Values.听
听
Jacobson's work in aesthetics was awarded the John Fisher Memorial Prize and has been reprinted broadly and translated into several languages. His essay, 鈥淯tilitarianism without Consequentialism: The Case of John Stuart Mill,鈥� was chosen by听The Philosophers鈥� Annual听as one of the ten best philosophy articles published in 2008. Jacobson is co-editor (with Justin D鈥橝rms) of the volume,听Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics听(Oxford University Press). Jacobson and D鈥橝rms have published a series of papers on sentimentalism and the philosophy of emotion, and their book,听Rational Sentimentalism, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He is currently working on another book project,听Solving the Mill Problem: How to Reconcile the Principles of Liberty and Utility.
听
听

Selected Papers:

  1. 鈥淎 Defense of Mill鈥檚 Argument for the 鈥楶ractical Inseparability鈥� of the Liberties of Conscience (and the Absolutism it Entails),鈥� Social Philosophy & Policy 37 (2020): 9-30.
  2. "Whither Sentimentalism? On Fear, the Fearsome, and the Dangerous,鈥� in Ethical Sentimentalism, eds. Remy Debes and Karsten Stueber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
  3. 鈥淢oral Dumbfounding and Moral Stupefaction,鈥� Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 2 (2012): 289-315.
  4. 鈥�,鈥� The Philosophical Review 117 (2008): 159-191.
  5. 鈥淚n Praise of Immoral Art,鈥� Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155-99.