My current research explores ethical and epistemic issues surrounding disability, particularly cognitive disability. I am interested in what a flourishing life looks like for one who is cognitively disabled, as well as what other values, goods, and environments contribute to such flourishing. Additionally, recognizing the prevalence of reliance on personal testimony in the disability literature, I am deeply interested in the epistemic status of such testimony, and in how the testimony-based dialectic can accommodate the cognitively disabled, who may not be able to speak for themselves. Beyond the context of disability, I am also interested more broadly in love, dependency, connectedness, and the role they play in moral theory and epistemology.

Papers-in-Progress

The Authority of Personal Testimony About Disability

How does lived experience of disability confer epistemic authority? I look closely at what kind of deference is warranted in different scenarios and for different kinds of claims. I then identify the relevant features of personal testimony about the value of disability and develop a more fine-grained account of epistemic authority that distinguishes between kinds of testimony and the function they ought to serve in the evaluation of the value of disability. 

Not Blinded by Love: Caregiver testimony about the Cognitively Disabled

The cognitively disabled may not be able to testify on their own behalf, either because they are non-verbal, or because they lack the ability to effectively advocate for themselves. In such cases, their caregivers often speak on their behalf, only to find their testimony dismissed as being blinded by love. This paper precisifies worries that caregiver perceptions may be systematically distorted, and grounds these worries in the adaptive preference and doxastic partiality literature. I critically examine these worries and show that they rest either on question-begging assumptions about the potential of the cognitively disabled to live a good life, or other assumptions about the nature of love that are far from universal. I then build a positive case for the authority of caregiver testimony, based on attention as a requisite feature of care, and love as a moral emotion that helps one attend to the value of the other, analogous to how anger is sometimes said to aid recognition of injustice.

Cognitive Disability and Lives Worth Living

This paper explores what a flourishing life might look like for the cognitively disabled and identifies a lack of autonomy as the key obstacle. I draw on moral psychology and feminist philosophy to re-imagine autonomy such that it is compatible with vulnerability and dependency, and hence make the case for a higher level of flourishing for the cognitively disabled than might be supposed. 

Social Work for a Theory of Essence and Potentiality

What does it mean to say that disability is mere difference "in itself"? A common strategy involves comparison across contexts, excluding effects that do not obtain in some contexts as not being attributable to disability “in itself”. This, however, is problematic, first because some accounts of the ontology of disability hold that what is a disability depends on context, and second because there might also be pragmatic reason to take contextual effects into account. This paper shows how the concepts of essence, potentiality, naturalness, and moral desirability can help cash out the notion of disability in itself in a way that is sensitive to these issues.