Professor Ingrid Robeyns

Professor Ingrid Robeyns works on issues in contemporary political philosophy and applied ethics, and holds the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. She specialises in applied and "non-ideal" ethics, interdisciplinary research, and developing normative frameworks and methods. Additionally, she is affiliated as a visiting professor at the Center for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at LSE.

In 2022, she received the prestigious Vici grant from the Dutch Research Council, allowing her to establish a research team focused on the ethical and political-philosophical structures of future visions, which commenced in September 2023.

Until the end of 2022, she worked on the Fair Limits Project, which investigates the moral limits of resource accumulation in conjunction with innovations in distributive justice philosophy. Funded by an ERC Consolidators Grant, a synthetic book on this project was published in July 2023, alongside her recently released book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, which has been translated into several languages.

Professor Robeyns is also well-known for her research on the capability approach. After having received her PhD degree from Cambridge University under the Supervision of Amartya Sen in 2003, she spent many years developing a generalisation of the work on the capability approach as it had been developed in the work by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and many others. In 2017 she published the synthesis of two decades of research on the capability approach with the open access book Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-examined (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers).

She has held significant leadership roles, including as the first academic director of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) and as the 8th president of the Human Development and Capability Association (2018-2020). She serves on several editorial boards, including of Economics and Philosophy and was elected to the Netherlands Royal Academy of Science and Arts in 2018.

Ingrid Robeyns is an active commentator on public affairs in the Netherlands and internationally. She has been blogging at Crooked Timber since 2006.