Professor Railton's main research has been in ethics and the philosophy of science, focusing especially on questions about the nature of objectivity, value, norms, and explanation. Recently, he has also begun working in aesthetics, moral psychology, and the theory of action. He has a special interest in the bearing of empirical research in psychology and evolutionary theory on these questions. A collection of some of his papers in ethics and meta-ethics, Facts, Values, and Norms, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2003. He has been a visiting professor at Berkeley and Princeton, and he has received fellowships from the Society for the Humanities (Cornell), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been associated with  CREA (Paris) and CSMN (Oslo). Professor Railton is a recipient of the 2009 D'Arms Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities.

Professor Railton is on leave Fall 2009.