Hanna Pickard

HANNA PICKARD, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and bioethics. Her research centers on how society responds to maladaptive behaviors like crime or drug use. She is a leading applied philosopher in the fields of moral psychology and the philosophy of psychiatry. Through her applied approach to research, Pickard explores a range of areas, including mental health, addiction, clinical ethics, the self, and criminal law and policy. Currently, she leads a research project titled Responsibility Without Blame, which explores the counterproductive ways society responds to maladaptive behaviors such as crime or addiction. She is using her Responsibility Without Blame framework to advocate for a radical new approach to criminal justice. With Nicola Lacey, a professor of law at LSE, Pickard has authored a series of papers calling for the criminal justice system to establish two routes for delivering justice—one centered on justice for victims and one centered on responsibility and rehabilitation for offenders.

Pickard joined Johns Hopkins from the University of Birmingham in the U.K. in 2019, where she was Chair in Philosophy of Psychology, and from Princeton University, where she served as a visiting research scholar in cognitive science for two years.