My current research is on the moral dimension of the concepts of spontaneity and pre-personal perception in Merleau-Ponty's work, which also includes the concept of pre-judication in Husserl. Overall my work is centered around the description of extreme moral phenomenon such as spontaneous heroism and their significance to human existence.

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.