Carl Hildebrand earned his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford and is Research Assistant Professor in the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. His research engages questions at the intersection of ethics, moral psychology, and the history of philosophy. His current research focuses on the role of sympathy in Immanuel Kant’s conception of moral character and the good life. This includes ideas surrounding habit, moral education, moral weakness, forgiveness, and grace, among other things. He recently began a new project on the philosophy of forgiveness which examines how difficult emotions like anger and resentment may feature in a virtue-based account of forgiveness.

He has taught ethics in a variety of settings, most recently teaching “A Life Worth Living” and developing a new course titled “The Love We Give and the Lies We Tell: The Ethics of Relationships” for The University of Hong Kong’s Common Core curriculum. Prior to that he taught in philosophy departments at the University of the Fraser Valley and the University of Oxford. He has taught ethics to public policy students at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and medical students at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine.