I am Professor of Practical Philosophy and currently Head of Department. Before taking up my position in Stockholm, I held postdoctoral and research fellowships at the University of Connecticut, Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg, an Associate Professorship at Linköping University, and a Professorship at Umeå University. I have led research projects on moral motivation, moral responsibility, collective responsibility, and causation, and was the initiator and first coordinator of the 15-year Moral Responsibility Research Initiative (later Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project).

Research interests

Much of my research concerns moral responsibility and the normative structures that underlie it. I have developed an account of responsibility attributions grounded in explanatory relations between agents' motivational qualities and the events they are responsible for, and used this to address debates over compatibilism, moral luck, the epistemic condition on responsibility, and collective responsibility. Together with Romy Eskens (Utrecht University), I have also been developing an account of moral balance that we think underpins retributive desert, liability to defensive harm, reduced obligations toward wrongdoers, distributive political justice, and a range of other normative phenomena.

A second cluster of research concerns collective ethics: shared obligations, collective responsibility, and the instrumental reasons that individuals have to contribute to collective goods. A central problem here is how individuals can have purely instrumental reasons to act when they are powerless to affect the outcome—what I call the hard problem of inefficacy. I argue that standard difference-making accounts get the structure of instrumental reasoning wrong, and that instrumental reasons are fundamentally about contributing to what the situation calls for, not about making a difference to outcomes. In addition, I have defended accounts of what it is for groups to have obligations and be responsible for outcomes.

In metaethics, my main interests have been moral disagreement, moral motivation, and the nature of normative judgments. I have defended non-absolutist accounts of moral disagreement and attributions of correctness to judgments and utterances, and argued for a broadly non-cognitivist account of moral judgments that explains the complex relation between moral judgment and motivation. Recently, I have argued that whether reason judgments serve a motivational or a political function is a distinctly a posteriori matter, with potential implications for the nature of practical rationality, normative judgment, and moral worth.

Selected recent publications

Björnsson, G. and Francén, R. forthcoming: "Reason Judgments—Political or Motivational?". Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 21.

Björnsson, G. forthcoming: "Instrumental Reasons for the Powerless: Towards a Solution to the Hard Problem of Inefficacy". In M. Gunnemyr, R. van Oeveren, and J. W. Wieland (eds.), The Ethics of Inefficacy. Routledge.

Björnsson, G. and Eskens, R. 2025: "On Discounting Wrongdoers". Analysis.

Björnsson, G. 2022: "Blame, Deserved Guilt, and Harms to Standing". In A. B. Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. Cambridge University Press, pp. 198–216.

Björnsson, G. and Hess, K. M. 2017: “Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporations”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94, pp. 273–98

Björnsson, G. 2015: “Disagreement, correctness, and the evidence for metaethical absolutism”, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 10, pp. 160–187.

Björnsson, G., McPherson, T. 2014: “Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the specification problem”, Mind, 124: 1–38.

Björnsson, G., Persson, K. 2013: “A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 87: 611-39.

Björnsson, G., Persson, K. 2012: “The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility”, Noûs 46(2): 326–354.

Björnsson, G., Finlay, S. 2010: “Metaethical contextualism defended”, Ethics 121:1 pp. 7-36.