Dr. Connie Rosati
Freedom Center Visiting Fellow
Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy and Professor of Law
Department of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
At the Freedom Center, Working with:
Dr. Steven Wall and Dr. Michael McKenna
All About Connie Rosati
I received the Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan and J.D. from Harvard Law School. In fall of 2020, I joined the faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin, but I have previously taught at the University of Arizona, Rutgers, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Davis, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the University of San Diego Law School. My research interests lie principally in the foundations of ethics and in jurisprudential questions about constitutional interpretation and the objectivity of law.
What are your goals as a visiting fellow?
My chief aim while a Visiting Fellow at the University of Arizona is to make progress on my book project, Personal Good. I will also be working on an article in legal theory. For both projects, I hope to take advantage of the opportunity for extended conversation with the ethicists and political philosophers at the Freedom Center and in the philosophy department.
Some philosophers have defended informed-desire theories according to which what is good for a person is what she would want herself to want if she were fully informed and rational. Here rationality is part of the criticism of desires. Other philosophers connect well-being to our capacities as autonomous agents—agents capable of reflecting, deliberating, and choosing rationally.
How do philosophers today think about the connection between a person’s well-being and their ability to make rational choices?
Your work often explores what gives norms their authority. What first drew you to these foundational questions in metaethics?
My interest in normativity, as I would put it, is that normativity is what metaethics most fundamentally concerns. I have particular interests in understanding and developing forms of moral realism, as well as understanding the normativity of law. In one publication, “Constitutional Realism,” I defend a form of constitutional realism—the idea that there are facts about what the constitution requires, forbids, and permits.
I see philosophy of law as involving some of the same issues and concerns that arise in metaethics and ethics. H. L. A. Hart is famous for calling our attention to the normativity of law, though other legal theorists, such as Lon Fuller, had their own ideas about what the normativity of law involves. Fortunately, in recent years, other philosophers have developed interests at the intersection of law and metaethics, and much interesting work in this area has been published. So I’m no longer thinking about these things by myself.
What and from whom, are there any emerging issues in the philosophy of law that you think deserve more attention from philosophers?
Please share a recent publication or project with us that you would like to highlight.
My Presidential Address for the APA Central Division, “The Lincoln Virtues,” offers a very preliminary version of some ideas I hope to develop in a second book. To see some of the central ideas that will be developed in my book project, Personal Good, see my article “Welfare and Rational Fit,” which was published in Oxford Studies in Metaethics (Vol. 15).
