Professor Anderson specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics and several series of articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics (focusing on Kant, Mill, and Dewey). She is currently writing a book on the ideal of ethno-racial integration in democratic theory.

Professor Anderson was nominated and elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.