My research spans normative ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, and aesthetics. In addition to my central research agenda in moral philosophy, I have research projects in philosophy of art, especially philosophy of literature and the relation between aesthetic and ethical values.
Dissertation
None of us is an ideal moral agent. We are weak-willed, self-indulgent, and so on. We often fail, individually and collectively, to do what we ought to do, and many of our moral failings are foreseeable. Normative theories which seek to provide an account of what we ought to do, all-things-considered, are accordingly forced to strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, these theories are meant to provide a demanding standard by which to measure our conduct and characters. When we point out what an agent ought to have done, we are marking how short she has fallen – how she could have done, or been, better. On the other hand, these theories are meant to issue in practical guidance. That means saying something about what we, in our actual non-ideal situation, given our imperfect characters, ought to do. And this seems to require taking certain of our moral failings for granted.
My dissertation probes the tension between these two facets of normative theories, the one uncompromising, the other concessive. It takes up normative questions about what we ought to do and how we ought to relate to one another in light of our non-ideal characters; and meta-ethical questions about how we should understand the nature and structure of normative judgment, given that different ethical questions require abstracting away from different aspects of our imperfect characters and circumstances.
Papers
Why Plan-Expressivists Can't Pick Up the Moral Slack (forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics)
This paper raises two problems for plan-expressivism concerning normative judgments about non-corealizable actions: actions which cannot both be performed. First, plan-expressivists associate normative judgment with an attitude which satisfies a corealizability constraint, but this constraint is (in the interpersonal case) unwarranted, and (in the intrapersonal case) warranted only at the price of a contentious normative premise. Ayars (2021) holds that the pair of judgments ‘A should φ’ and ‘B should ψ’ is coherent only if one believes that A can φ while B ψ’s. But this is false. Both Gibbard (2003) and Ayars hold that the pair of judgments ‘A should φ’ and ‘A should ψ’ is coherent only if one believes that A can φ and ψ. But this assumes possibilism. Second, the paper demonstrates, cases involving interpersonal non-corealizability prompt judgments about what multiple agents should do which – contra Gibbard – are not plausibly associated with any planning subject.
Hypocrisy as Two-Faced (forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics)
This paper argues that there is a distinctive vice of hypocrisy, which is Janus-faced. The vice of hypocrisy is the self-excepting avoidance of a particular pain, namely, the pain associated with being an object of blame one believes deserved. One can self-exceptingly avoid this pain attitudinally or behaviorally. With “attitudinal” hypocrisy, a person avoids it at the level of her beliefs: she avoids forming the belief that she is blameworthy for some act, while blaming others for their comparable acts. With “behavioral” hypocrisy, by contrast, a person avoids it at the level of her behavior. She shields herself from the blame she believes her acts merit (e.g. by hiding what she has done), while blaming others for their comparable acts. The paper argues that both forms of hypocrisy are objectionable and explains how they are in tension, such that a given instance of the vice will typically involve only one or the other. Though both attitudinal and behavioral hypocrisy selectively spare the hypocrite the same pain, they require incongruous moral-psychological states: the attitudinal hypocrite avoids blaming herself, while the behavioral hypocrite proceeds on the assumption she is blameworthy.
What are We to Do? Making Sense of 'Joint Ought' Talk (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, with Rowan Mellor)
We argue for three main claims. First, the sentence ‘A and B ought to φ and ψ’ can express what we a call a joint-ought claim: the claim that the plurality A and B ought to φ and ψ respectively. Second, the truth-value of this joint-ought claim can differ from the truth-value of the pair of claims ‘A ought to φ’ and ‘B ought to ψ.’ This is because what A and B jointly ought to do can diverge from what they individually ought to do: it may be true that A and B jointly ought to φ and ψ respectively, yet false that A ought to φ and false that B ought to ψ; and vice-versa. Third, either of two prominent semantic analyses of ‘ought’ – Mark Schroeder’s relational semantics, and Angelika Kratzer’s modal semantics – can model joint-ought claims and this difference in truth-value.