Samuel Chan Yao Jian

Sam spent all his academic years at Sheffield, earning a Law LLB (Hons) in 2017 and an MA Philosophy in 2021. He also worked as a Commissioning Legal Editor at Sweet & Maxwell Malaysia between his LLB and MA years. In 2022, he was awarded the AHRC White Rose scholarship to commence his PhD Philosophy under the supervision of Dr Max Hayward and Dr Timothy Ryan Byerly.

Sam’s interests span the intersections between philosophy of religion, metaethics, and free will. His PhD work focuses primarily on constructing a new theistic constructivist account of moral obligations, taking inspiration from the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Imago Dei. He argues that both secular and current theistic constructivist theories are inadequate in accounting for both the content and the normativity of moral obligations. He develops a new theory – Divine Imager Theory – showing that it can provide us with a sufficient account of the content and normativity of moral obligations.