Monika Betzler - Biography#

Monika Betzler holds the Chair for Practical Philosophy and Ethics at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich/Germany. She is a philosopher specialized in a broad portfolio of moral psychology, normative ethics, philosophy of agency and normativity. She studies these themes from a distinct perspective based on the presumption that humans are both rational and emotional, autonomous and vulnerable. She has helped establish a new research field in the philosophy of personal relationships, and is one of the leading moral philosophers of her country.

She has been engaged in bridging the gap between philosophical theory and practice, e.g. in her function as elected Spokeswoman of the Munich Center for Ethics and Philosophy of Practice and as Director of the Graduate School “Ethics in Practice,” but also in many other leading functions. She has been serving as an elected member of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee for Biotechnology for 12 years. Most recently, she has been appointed as a member of the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO.

Her work has appeared in highly esteemed journals and presses, such as Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal for Applied Philosophy, Inquiry, Dialectica, Philosophical Psychology, Social Theory and Practice, and with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge (among many others).

She has also been awarded many fellowships and grants, securing well over €4.8 million in funding. She has been a member of 15 habilitation committees in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria; and she has supervised 26 doctoral dissertations in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the USA. Several of the doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows who were under her primary supervision have pursued successful academic careers.

She has given well over 200 talks (mostly invited, including key note talks) in the past 15 years, both nationally and internationally.

Full CV