Chetan Cetty

Hi, welcome to my website! I'm an Assistant Professor at Lafayette College. Before this, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. I grew up in Singapore and completed my undergraduate degree at the National University of Singapore before completing an M.A. in philosophy at Georgia State University. I was a visiting researcher at the Australian National University in 2015.

I work primarily in political and moral philosophy. My primary research concerns how moral and political theories should be constructed, including questions about the proper role of idealization within such theories, what feasibility constraints are and how they apply to such theories, and how concerns about alienation and action-guidingness should bear on them.​ This aside, I am also interested in the ethics of various pressing policy questions in our society today such as gun control, worker freedom in capitalist societies, and the impact of AI.

I've taught a wide variety of courses, and my teaching is focused around class discussion. At Penn, I was a Critical Speaking Fellow at the Penn Communication with the Curriculum (CWiC) program. As part of this fellowship, I designed and taught a course on ethics and public policy that, unlike most philosophy courses, placed significant weight on oral communication exercises in student assessment.

If you wish to contact me, I can be reached at chetancetty[at]gmail.com.

P.S. People often have trouble pronouncing my name. The phonetic spelling for it is chay-tun (first name) set-tee (last name). That said, the "un" sound in my first name is closer to the "on" in "Jason" or the "an" in "Nathan" than the "un" in "bun" or "ton." For an audio sample, see here. I know it can be difficult to get it right but I appreciate the effort!