My research interests have mainly to do with ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of law. I am focusing on contemporary theories of justice and democracy, both the justification of fundamental rights and the institutional mechanisms for enforcing them. I am interested in political liberalism and its multiculturalist implications, the issue of public reason and deliberation, and in constitutionalism and legal argumentation.

As part of the Chair's activities, I am conducting a research program on institutions of tolerance with a political dimension that also applies to moral psychology and the philosophy of education. In 2011-2012, I also began studying the issue of corruption in and of democracy. Since 2012, I have been co-ordinating the CORDÉ Corruption et démocratie research group.

My main research interests are in ethics and more specifically in meta-ethics and moral psychology, a field at the confluence of moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. Research concerning moral realism and moral epistemology lead me to study the nature of emotions and their relation to value judgements. I thus argued that emotions consist in perceptual experiences of evaluative properties (Tappolet 1995, 2000). Emotions are still one of my main research interests. My publications in this domain, some of which have been produced in collaboration with Luc Faucher (UQAM), bear on the relation between emotions and attention, and on the modularity and plasticity of emotions.

In collaboration with Ruwen Ogien (CNRS, Paris) I have also worked in normative ethics, and have examined the relationship between value judgments and ethical judgments (Ogien & Tappolet 2009). I have also been interested in the relationship between evaluative judgments and actions, and more specifically the nature of phenomena such as weakness of will (Stroud & Tappolet 2003). The question of the relationship between autonomy, rationality and emotion is key to my future research.