Rock Ethics Institute

Martina Orlandi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Engaged Ethics at the Rock Ethics Institute and The Schreyer Honors College at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Orlandi does research within the Empathy & Moral Psychology Lab and is working to develop a new ethics curriculum for The Schreyer Honors College.

Dr. Orlandi did her graduate work at McGill University where she was a member of the Research Center for Ethics (CRE) and of the Interuniversity Research Group on Normativity (GRIN), which she also coordinated in 2016-2017. Before joining Penn State, Dr. Orlandi was a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

​Dr. Orlandi's research interests are broad and range across philosophy of mind and action, ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. She has a longstanding interest in practical irrationality, particularly self-control and self-deception, where she has worked on developing an account of what it is to come out of self-deception.

​More recently, Dr. Orlandi has been working on conspiratorial beliefs and why they tenaciously persist over time. She is also working on a project about resilience where she proposes that we abandon the traditionally individualistic notion known to undermine structural injustices and cause burnout in favour of a relational account of resilience. She will be presenting a nascent version of this project at the Panel on the Status of Women at the Pacific Division of American Philosophical Association that will take place in April 2022.

​Outside of her day job, Dr. Orlandi has a strong commitment to public philosophy and has published her work in several popular venues. In 2019, she published (in The Conversation) an article on why good character testimonies do not constitute a defence for sexual harassment. And in 2020-2021 Dr. Orlandi was a regular columnist at The Prindle Post, where she wrote about ethics and social philosophy. Since 2017 she has been one of the hosts of a weekly radio show on air on CFMB1280, to talk philosophy with a wider audience.

Dr. Orlandi is originally from Italy, and did her B.A. at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and her M.A. at the University of Florence.