Dr Attila Tanyi awarded a prestigious EURIAS Junior Research Fellowship

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Attila Tanyi

Dr Attila Tanyi has recently been awarded a prestigious fellowship to spend the 2016/17 academic year as a EURIAS Junior Research Fellow in the Collegium Helveticum (ETH/University of Zurich) in Zurich, Switzerland. Dr Tanyi will be leading a project on the role of institutions in reducing consequentialist moral demands. Consequentialists hold that the right course of action is the one that produces the best results as judged from an impartial perspective. However, it is often claimed that this requirement is excessively demanding.

The objective of the project is to discuss an unexamined response to this objection. The core idea is to direct attention to the ability of institutions to reduce moral demands on individuals. The project argues for this idea by showing that a division of labour is justifiable: the demanding moral principles regulate institutions, whereas individuals have the duty to set up and maintain these institutions. Dr Tanyi plans to write several research papers during his stay in Zurich and also hopes to lay thereby the foundations of a research monograph on the subject.