Nick Schuster
Twitter: @NickShoeStir
Nick Schuster
Research Fellow joining soon!
Nick Schuster received his PhD in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020. His specialties are ethical theory, moral psychology, and the history of ethics. His dissertation challenges the standard Aristotelian conceptions of virtue, vice, continence, and incontinence and develops new ways to understand the psychology of each of these states. The resulting scheme provides an alternative framework for understanding moral agency, one that does justice to the many psychological subtleties that can make moral agents good, bad, better, and worse. In addition to advancing this program, Nick is developing a complementary project on the skill model of virtue. This project aims to give an account of moral intelligence based on the kind of practical intelligence involved in ordinary skilled activities. But unlike similar projects by other philosophers, which have been developed primarily within the eudaimonist tradition in ethical theory, Nick's takes a deontological approach to understanding the structure of practical intelligence, generally, and moral intelligence in particular. Nick has presented his work at various notable venues, including meetings of the American Philosophical Association and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, where he was awarded the Young Ethicist Prize in 2019. His research has been published in The Journal of Ethics, and his public philosophy has been published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.