My work is focused on the classical questions of metaethics: what is the meaning of moral utterances, which metaphysical status do moral properties have, what types of reasons and justification are adequate for moral judgments and which mental processes are involved in moral deliberation? In my earlier work I defended a qualified version of prudential contractualism as an adequate argument for the justification of moral norms and argued that it should be embedded in an antirealist account. Currently I am interested in the implications of findings of cognitive science for philosophical ethics. More specifically, I try to understand which kind of (psychological) multiple-systems-account of moral cognition is most plausible and what it tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of everyday as well as philosophical moral justification. I cooperate closely with Dr. Michael Öllinger and his team of empirical psychologists who have just started to test the development of moral cognition in children (behavioral experiments and EEG studies). Thereby we hope to disentangle the effects of different systems of moral cognition, which - according to our initial hypothesis - develop sequentially.