In addition to his Professorship at the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Norbert Paulo is co-director of a research project on the ethics of self-driving cars at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. Until May 2025, he also headed a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Heisenberg) on thought experiments in practical philosophy at LMU Munich.

Previously, he was a substitute professor at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a research assistant for practical philosophy at the University of Graz and for legal and social philosophy at the University of Salzburg. Norbert Paulo received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg, where he had previously completed a double degree (law and philosophy). He habilitated at the University of Graz.

He was a fellow of the “Junge ZiF” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University and has conducted research at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Universities.

He is co-founder of the philosophy blog praefaktisch, co-director of the DFG-funded scientific network Methoden Praktischer Ethik (Methods of Practical Ethics), and a liaison professor for the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

In addition to digitalization and artificial intelligence, Norbert Paulo is particularly interested in the methodology of practical philosophy, for example empirically informed ethics, but also moral psychology and experimental philosophy in general. He also deals with political philosophy, applied ethics, legal philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie (German Society for Philosophy)

German Society for Analytic Philosophy

Paulo, Norbert. 2016. The Confluence of Philosophy and Law in Applied Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2023. „The Trolley Problem in the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles“. The Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 1046–66. doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqad051.

Paulo, Norbert, and Jan Christoph Bublitz, Ed. 2020. Empirische Ethik: Grundlagentexte aus Psychologie und Philosophie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Paulo, Norbert, and Lando Kirchmair. 2024. Moral Dilemmas Involving Self-Driving Cars: How to Regulate Them and Why Your Opinion Matters. New York, NY: Routledge.

———. 2025. Selbstfahrende Autos – wie soll über Leben und Tod entschieden werden? #philosophieorientiert. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70650-3.

Smith, Adam. 2023. Philosophische Schriften. Edited by Norbert Paulo. Berlin: Suhrkamp.