Jorah Dannenberg

Jorah Dannenberg came to Stanford from UCLA, where he finished his degree in 2010. In his dissertation, "Promising as Paradigm," he explored and criticized the treatment of promising in contemporary moral philosophy. He then presented a novel way of understanding the activity that locates the fundamental source of the bond of a promise in the promisor’s own will. Promising continues to be one central focus of Dannenberg's research. One piece of current work focuses on promising to ourselves. Another on the role that the social practice of promising plays when we make promise to others. Dannenberg is also currently writing about the phenomenon of “moral luck,” and in particular whether recognizing that we can be morally lucky or unlucky should lead us to question whether our commitment to morality rests on false pretenses.