Zoë A. Johnson King is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy who joined Harvard in Fall 2o22. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, a secondary school teacher in Croydon, and an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge (in that order, going backwards through time).

Johnson King works in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, decision theory, and philosophy of law. Her primary research project lies within moral psychology and focuses on issues involving motivation, agency, and responsibility. She is particularly interested in praise and praiseworthiness, in contrast to the overwhelming focus on blame and blameworthiness found elsewhere in the literature. She is also particularly interested in evaluating the actions, beliefs, and character of the sorts of manifestly morally imperfect people that we find in everyday life, who must decide what to do while experiencing a great deal of moral uncertainty and ignorance and while facing surrounding circumstances that are frequently profoundly unjust or otherwise deeply morally challenging. She has published widely on these topics; her publications can be found on her personal website.

Johnson King taught Citizenship and Religious Studies in Croydon, where she enjoyed corrupting the youth with philosophical ideas. She also designed schemes of work focused on developing the skills involved in articulating one's point of view on a complex moral or social issue, comparing one's view to alternatives, and defending it against objections. With this background in place, she co-founded the Michigan High School Ethics Bowl during the first year of her PhD and co-organized the Bowl throughout the remaining four years. The Michigan Bowl is unusual in that it is the result of a collaborative partnership between Philosophy graduate students and a local community organization, which solicits "case studies" from local professionals about ethical issues arising in their line of work or facing the state of Michigan as a whole, edited by the graduate students to highlight their philosophical content and then discussed by them with high schoolers over the course of an academic year. In 2014 Johnson King received an "Arts of Citizenship" award from Rackham graduate school for this community-facing work, and in 2018 she was awarded Michigan Philosophy's inaugural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion award.