Katharina Berndt RasmussenAssociate Professor

About me

I’m an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, SU, and a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies. I hold a PhD (fil.dr) in practical philosophy. I defended my doctoral thesis Democracy and the Common Good: A Study of the Weighted Majority Rule at Stockholm University in 2013. Since then I’ve held postdoctoral positions at Stockholm University and at the Institute for Futures Studies, where I have worked in different research projects on implicit bias, discrimination, the concept of harm, the boundary problem in democratic theory, and climate ethics and future generations. I have published in peer-reviewed journals on the topics of implicit bias, #metoo, the non-identity problem, harm and discrimination, and fairness.

My current research project seeks to improve our understanding of implicit bias (roughly, automatically activated prejudices) with the help of a game theoretical analysis of social norms. The general idea is that implicit biases can be modelled as systematic failures to follow egalitarian social norms, and that such a model can help us find new ways to address the resulting problems of social inequality and structural discrimination. Another part of my research tries to assess whether democracy fails to take into account the interests of future generations and thereby to solve the climate crisis. Here I look into the normative principles that justify democracy and assess whether these principles imply that democracy is irrevocably biased toward the present, or whether they could guide us towards enabling democracy to deal with the climate crisis.

Publications

Berndt Rasmussen, Katharina (2020) Implicit Bias and Discrimination, Theoria, 86:6 Special Issue: Women in Philosophy – Voices from Scandinavia, pp. 727-748, https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12227.

Berndt Rasmussen, Katharina & Nicolas Olsson Yaouzis (2020) “#MeToo, Social Norms, and Sanctions”, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 28:3, pp. 273-295, https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12207.

Algander, Per & Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (2019) “Asymmetry and Non-Identity”, Utilitas, 31:3, pp. 213–230, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820818000341.

Berndt Rasmussen, Katharina (2019) “Harm and Discrimination”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22:4, pp. 873-891, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9908-4.

Berndt Rasmussen, Katharina (2013) Democracy and the Common Good: A Study of the Weighted Majority Rule, Doctoral thesis in practical philosophy, Stockholm: Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, urn:nbn:se:su:diva-92851.

Berndt Rasmussen, Katharina (2012) “Should the Probabilities Count?” Philosophical Studies, 159: 2, pp. 205-218, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9698-1.

For further info, visit my personal webpage: http://katharinaberndtrasmussen.com.