A public-facing, interdisciplinary, and student-centered approach to philosophy

Jennifer Morton is no stranger to living with uncertainty. She grew up in Lima, Peru, in the politically turbulent 1980s and ’90s and was the first in her family to attend college—experiences that shaped her academic interests and approaches.

The philosophy professor draws on education, sociology, economics, politics, and more, asking, “How can philosophers contribute to that conversation?” This interdisciplinary mindset is what led Morton, who has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 2021, to her field.

“I felt like I could do philosophy and still be interested in lots of different things and think about lots of different things, which has really turned out to be true for me,” says Morton, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy in the School of Arts & Sciences with a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Education.

On uncertainty and striving

Lately she’s been reading works by sociologist Matthew Desmond, economists John Kay and Mervyn King, and political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. “Doing moral philosophy without being attentive to how the social world actually functions seems to me to be doing moral philosophy with one hand tied behind our backs,” she says.

In philosophy, Morton has been re-reading a lot of Thomas Hobbes. She is connecting his response to upheaval in 17th-century Britain to the current political environment and the state of precarity or uncertainty—not only in the sense of poverty, she says, but also the lack of political conditions that make people feel secure in planning for the future.

Hobbes “is often read as someone who is trying to argue for an authoritarian form of government, but I’ve really been reading him as someone who understood what a threat to our flourishing insecurity was,” says Morton, who is working on a book about precarity.

She says her experience growing up in Peru amid terrorism, inflation, and a fractured political system informs this work. “We ended up electing President [Alberto] Fujimori, who at first tackled very seriously this source of fear—the terrorism—but then this enabled him to become, in essence, an autocrat in office,” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that—how people feeling insecure in their position and feeling afraid can really pave the path to being willing to sacrifice so many of the things you think you wouldn’t want to sacrifice.”

These conditions meant that her grandmother—who raised her while Morton’s mother sent money home from the United Kingdom—aspired for her to leave Peru.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and Ph.D. from Stanford University, Morton taught in the City University of New York system, where most of her students were also the first in their families to attend college. Wanting to highlight not only the financial and academic challenges of the first-generation experience but also the ethical ones, she wrote the book “Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility.”

“I saw the challenges that they had in navigating that experience, feeling torn between their obligations to their families—their previous identities, their neighborhoods, their communities—and trying to access these new networks,” says Morton.

She is also currently applying a different lens to ambition: She is co-writing a book—with New York University Abu Dhabi philosophy professor Sarah Paul—on the rationality of striving. People are often told to persevere, Morton notes, but sometimes it may be better to quit.

“Part of the problem is, in some cases, we don’t really know what situation we’re in,” Morton says. “Are we in the situation where we should just put aside the challenge and the setback and keep going because we’re going to get there, or are we in the situation where we really should be paying attention to what the world is telling us and seeking an alternative path?”

A lot of work in the philosophy of agency focuses on actions under a person’s control, such as flipping a light switch or going for a walk, Morton says. Situations where we’re uncertain whether we can succeed—such as starting a business or working to pass legislation—are philosophically less tractable.

“But these are also the kinds of endeavors that many of us find very meaningful and valuable to pursue,” she says. “Our book is an attempt to think through some philosophical questions in the philosophy of action through the lens of this kind of striving agency.”

Turning outward

The experiences that shaped Morton’s research interests also make her an empathetic teacher and advisor. Dustin Webster, a postdoc at Penn and co-director of Penn’s Project for Philosophy of the Young, recalls first connecting with Morton while he was a master’s student at Teachers College, Columbia University and she was at CUNY. There was no class on virtue education, so his advisor put him in touch with Morton, who worked with him on an independent study.

“Jen cares very much about her students. I think the fact that she was willing to make time for me, a student who she didn’t know, based just on the word of a colleague, speaks volumes to this,” Webster says.

Sixth-year philosophy Ph.D. student Tyler Re says that as a mentor, Morton has been attentive to the emotional and developmental aspects of graduate school—helping him to feel proud of his work and make the transition from student to scholar.

“When it comes to her advising, one of Jen’s virtues is that she is never dogmatic—no theory, view, or conclusion gets special consideration ‘just because,’” says Re. “This allows her to point out when I am making assumptions that need to be defended, or when I haven’t considered an issue from all the relevant perspectives.”

Re’s dissertation on the philosophy of labor got Morton interested in precarity in the workplace. Whether thinking about this, first-generation students, or the rationality of striving, her work applies to people’s everyday lives—and Morton’s public-facing writing and ability to communicate across disciplines speaks to this.

“Penn is a great place to do public philosophy. It stems from the fact that many people in the philosophy department at Penn are doing interdisciplinary work,” Morton says, citing philosophers of science, critical theorists who interact with people in Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies, and philosophers of education like herself.

“A lot of our discourse in the public sphere has to do with values and ethics and concepts that are important to how we lead our lives,” Morton says. “We’re thinking about justice, we’re thinking about tradition, about who belongs and who doesn’t, about citizenship, about what institutions of higher education are for. These are all questions that are, I think, foundational to society.”