Jonathan studied at Oxford as an undergraduate and UCL as a postgraduate. He held lectureships at Sheffield and Bristol before coming to Cardiff in 2008.

He is currently President of the British Society for Ethical Theory, President of the UK Sartre Society, Member of Council at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

Jonathan works in moral psychology, which means that he is  concerned with understanding the psychological concepts employed in ethical  discourse, with the extent to which these concepts are genuinely applicable to  people, and with ways in which our moral thinking can go wrong when we make  mistakes about human psychology.

His most recent publications have been concerned with the  ideas of character and virtue, particularly with whether empirical psychology  has shown these to embody a mistaken view of human behaviour, and with  clarifying and assessing the theory of the origins and nature of character at  the heart of twentieth-century French existentialist thought.

He is currently working on ways in which moral psychology  can be applied directly to current debates in applied ethics.

Research interests

• moral psychology
• existentialism
• virtue ethics
• Kantian ethics
• applied ethics