I’m currently working on the question whether the idea of justice can be transferred to relations between humans and nonhumans; and in particular, I’m interested in the relationship between humans and animals on the one hand, and between humans and AI on the other. I argue that such relations are typically characterised by two types of asymmetries: first, while the most important premise in political philosophy is that humans are moral equals, this may not be true of our relations with nonhumans. Animals are often thought to possess a lower moral status than humans, and AI has no moral status at all. Second, we usually think that we humans are both owed justice, and owe justice at the same time. Again, this is neither true for animals, nor for AI: as far as we know, animals are not the kind of being that can have duties of justice, but they may very well be owed justice. In contrast, AI is not owed justice, but they may be the locus of duties of justice. Is it nevertheless possible to conceive such asymmetrical relations as relations of justice? I believe that exploring this question is interesting for three reasons: it helps conceptualising our social relations to nonhumans, it helps developing the concept of justice more clearly, and it helps to critically examine our methods of constructing and applying principles of justice. Click here for an english summary, and here for a german one.

I am pursuing this project at the Chair of Legal and Constitutional Studies at TU Dresden, where Sabine Müller-Mall is my advisor. As part of the OTPP program at Dresden, my position is funded by Germany's Excellence Initiative. I am also an associate PI at the Würzburg Centre for Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence, where I lead a project on machine normativity (subproject 2: machines as legal, political and moral actors)

In earlier work, I have written on questions of legitimacy, political authority, and punishment. In my dissertation, I developed an argument for the legitimacy of international criminal law institutions. In short, I argued that international institutions that punish massive human rights violations possess legitimate authority in virtue of their capacity to deter future crimes. However, because there can be reasonable disagreement about how to achieve this end, courts must - to a certain extent - include democratic elements into their institutional structure.