Personal Biography
I am a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus and a Marie Curie Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy. I completed my Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University. During my doctoral studies, I held visiting posts at Harvard Law School and Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. Prior to that, I completed an undergraduate degree in law and political theory, and two master’s degrees, one in philosophy and religion, with a thesis on the influence of feminist philosophy on legal claims within Orthodox Judaism, and a second in law and economics, with a thesis on the normative, economic, and legal foundations of effective altruism.
Research and Teaching
I write on topics at the intersection of moral, political, and legal philosophy. My current project deals with the moral constraints upon, and legal limits of, self-defense. Some areas of focus include justifications for and constraints on permissible harming, the ethics of risk-taking and risk-imposition in war, theories of harm aggregation in the context of war, and the influence of uncertainty on moral decision-making in war.
My work in philosophy and law is guided by two basic convictions. First, we need to understand moral intuitions systematically in order to derive from them moral principles that we can trust to govern behavior. Second, and consequently, moral principles should provide the standard against which legal constraints are evaluated. Methodologically, I use a quantitative approach, drawing mainly from mathematics and economics, in order to formalize and refine moral and legal claims. With the precision enabled by formal investigation, we can gain moral insights and philosophical tools that, in turn, can form the basis of a law that better comports with our ethical obligations. You can read more about this methodology in my essay, Moral Mathematics, published in Aeon magazine.
I have recently been awarded the American Philosophical Association’s 2023 Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship. The Fellowship supports dissemination of research in the field of ethics. During spring 2024, I will deliver the Baumgardt Memorial Lectures on the ethics of war at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Selected Publications
Elad Uzan, “Moral Sunk Costs in War and Self-Defence,” The Philosophical Quarterly 71(2) (2021): 359–377. [link]
Elad Uzan, “Soldiers, Civilians, and in bello Proportionality: A Proposed Revision,” The Monist 99(1) (2016): 87-96. [link]
Elad Uzan, “From Social Norm to Legal Claim: How American Orthodox Feminism Changed Orthodoxy in Israel,” Modern Judaism 36(2) (2016): 144-162. [link]