Anderson specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy; feminist theory; social epistemology; and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory; how we learn to improve our value judgments; the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation; and issues of race, gender, and equality.
She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard University Press, 1995), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton University Press, 2013), Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton University Press, 2017), and Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Anderson has written numerous articles on value theory; the ethical limitations of markets, facts, and values in social scientific research; feminist and social epistemology; racial integration and affirmative action; rational choice and social norms; democratic theory; egalitarianism; and the history of ethics. She is currently working on the history of egalitarianism.
A MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the British Academy, she designed and was the first director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Michigan.
