I develop an empirically informed approach to normative theorising in my research, drawing on moral psychology to explore dimensions of moral agency and apply them to examine moral and societal issues that are shaping many people’s lives.
The papers I have written, put together, recover the parts of human life I believe that have largely been silenced and masked by theories giving too much power to certain groups of people and leaving too little to others.
They fall along two major themes:
1) everyone is striving for their own meaningful life, whether it is intelligible to us or not, and whether they stand up for themselves, feel anguish and powerless, or simply remain unseen.
2) the “good” types of moral cognition—good in the sense of yielding morally desirable outcomes—aren’t as good as we often assume.
Basically I believe we make some of us look too perfect and others too dull and weak.
I aim to, piece by piece, recreate facets of “real” human experience, motivating a reconsideration of how we relate to others, in what way what we do now shapes the present and future of society, and what the ideal of equal respect—which we have talked so much at the institutional level—truly requires of as moral obligations towards each other.
Here is a list of published and in-review papers
Ying, Heng. “Beyond “moral progress”: A dual‐character conception of moral change.” Metaphilosophy 56, no. 2 (2025): 194-208. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12723
Ying, Heng. “Explaining Moral View Change: Second-Order Moral Reasoning.” The Journal of Value Inquiry (2025): 1-18. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-025-10069-2
In review:
Moral conflict: I argued for an agential account of moral conflict. The view that individuals are divided by group memberships obscures the deeper connections among individuals. They are connected by the psychological processes underlying their belief formation.
Moral progress: I argued that the independent thinking we often associate with leaders of progressive movements is in fact self-limiting.
In progress:
Moral judgment: I’m working on two papers on this topic
1) I challenge the view that moral judgments are biologically conditioned processes–many empirical studies hold this assumption. I aim to re-enliven moral judgments by offering an agent-centred framework. Freedom to choose responsive modes is a fundamental dimension of human existence.
2) I refute the Humean model of moral psychology. The main issue lies in the individualistic interpretative paradigm that informs the empirical studies supporting this model.
New projects:
Sibling injustices
Asymmetrical moral thinking
I welcome any comment and discussion on these topics.
