Stefan Riedener wins Young Researcher’s Prize 2024

Stefan Riedener is deeply grateful for the prize. He says that every honest researcher is sometimes scared by the boldness of their own claims. “One can never really be sure whether the path one is taking is good, or whether one is going down a dead end, or a route no one else wants to follow. I experience this prize as an enormous encouragement to believe in the things I am doing, and a profound motivation to try and continue my work.”

A journey through philosophy, mathematics and literature

Riedener’s main area of research is ethics, covering topics such as normative uncertainty, moral emotions like guilt and forgiveness, and special relationships. Besides philosophy, he has also studied mathematics and literature, finding philosophy to be the perfect combination of these subjects. "Mathematics gets at fundamental necessary facts. But these facts don’t tell us how to live. Literature deals with the problems of life. But it doesn’t explicitly state the relevant truths. Philosophy brings the rigor of mathematics to the problems of literature, and that is what appeals to me."

He says he pursued a career in philosophy because he loves its questions and the way it addresses them, but has never found an answer that satisfied him completely. After his BA in Zurich, he did an MA and a PhD in Oxford. This was when effective altruism was emerging there.

Balancing global impact with personal relationships

“Effective altruists try to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible and take significant action on that basis. When I arrived, it felt like a small Oxford-student initiative. And slightly later it was an enormous global movement. The idea appealed to me during my MA, and I was involved with the movement while I was in Oxford,” Riedener says.

But Riedener felt more and more uneasy about the movement. He now thinks effective altruism takes a wrong point of view. “Effective altruists try to look at the world from outside and detachedly ask how to do the most good overall. But I think as human beings, we’re always situated at a particular place: we have different relationships to different people, or different things and places. And these special relationships matter,” Riedener says.

His current research focuses on understanding the nature of these relationships and their role in determining how we ought to live. He explains his picture (which he is currently developping together with co-author Adam Lovett from the Australian Catholic University): "We live in an enormous universe filled with things that matter, like an awesome mountain, a beautiful poem, or an unjust institution. The value of these things can be positive, such as beauty, or negative, such as injustice. I think the key ethical experience of human life is that we can be in contact—in a kind of intimacy—with the value of these things," he says, and illustrates his idea with the value of a poem.  

“Maybe we’re emotionally moved by the beauty of the poem. Or maybe we have written the poem ourselves. Such involvement brings us in contact with the poem’s value. And I think this relation of contact is fundamentally important to how we ought to live."

Navigating global challenges through ethical values

On the one hand, Riedener thinks, we have special reasons to care about the things with which we’re in this relation.  The closeness we can have to our children, say, means that we have special reasons to care about them. On the other hand, we have reason to seek this intimacy with the good and avoid it with the bad. Thus, we have reason to appreciate the beauty of the universe, or to leave our distinct mark in making the world better, or to avoid destroying it. He says this way of thinking can help us navigate current global problems—like the ecological crisis, which he thinks is so much bigger than we realize.

For example, he says, we think our lives get better for us through consumption, or personal pleasures, or individualistic pursuit. “But with our way of life we wreck the planet. If we saw how our involvement with this destruction undercuts the meaningfulness of our own lives, we’d have much more regard for future humans and non-humans.”

The dream of writing something impactful

He also believes we generally see ourselves as disconnected from the past, as if we were just thrown into the world from nowhere.  “But we couldn’t exist without all previous generations, without the first mammals that walked the earth, or the first cell that emerged. If we appreciated these connections, we’d feel and act less anthropocentrically and have a broader horizon of concern.”

His dream project is to one day write something that can have a real impact on how we live our lives. “My hope is that I will be able to write something that actually moves people, actually makes them pause and maybe reorient their lives a bit. I think the form of this would have to be different from the standard academic article. And it would have to flow more directly out of my lived life. But I must have lived a bit more to be able, and to allow myself, to pursue this dream”.