My research program divides into two projects. The first is largely normative, the second largely conceptual.
I. The first project, “Explaining the Wrongness of Social Injustices,” consists of a series of papers that tackle problems arising within the tradition of critical and oppositional theory. These papers arose out of my puzzlement at the following fact. Most normative political theory focuses on explaining and delimiting the rightness, goodness, and betterness of some institution, action, or state of affairs; or at least it tries to specify the conditions under which that thing would be justified. It does not usually explain the wrongness, badness, or worseness of those political institutions or states of affairs we intuitively think wrong or bad, like racism, racial disadvantage, oppression, or severe poverty. Yet we should be at least as concerned with reducing wrongness and badness as with promoting rightness and goodness. And we cannot effectively reduce the former unless we can explain why particular wrongs are in fact wrong. I have thus written papers on "What's Bad about Poverty?", "Why Oppression Is Wrong," "Democracy, Race, and Authority: Or, Rescuing Democratic Authority from Global Oppression," "Terrorism and the Types of Wrongdoing" (which appeared in Public Affairs Quarterly 24, 3 (July 2010) and is downloadable below), and "The Scope of Justice and Global Dark Oppression."
II. The second track my overall research program pursues is largely conceptual. My research along this track tackles general conceptual questions about ethics, politics, ethical and political principles, and normative and critical theories. The aim here is to identify the essential features, the structure, and the interrelationships of ethics and morality, of ethical and political principles, of politics, and of normative theories. Along this track, I have pursued four research projects.
The first project concerns the structure of political and moral theories. My chief endeavor along these lines has been my dissertation. It asks to what extent political theories depend on ethics. I pursued this project in my dissertation. You can find more information about it here. I have also written a paper on the structure of a moral-cum-psychological-cum-cosmological theory: philosophical pessimism. The paper tries to specify the Theoretical Foundations of Pessimism.
The second project concerns the essential features of ethics and social justice. Here I am concerned with the content and structure of ethics and morality, as well as the ontological status of ethical principles. This project produced the papers "Social Justice and the Normativity of Morality" and "Anthropocentrism and the Argument from Gaia Theory." The latter was published as a peer-reviewed article in Ethics & the Environment 15, 2 (2010).
The third project investigates the nature of politics. My paper "What Is Politics?" tries to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for its existence. The Functions of Politics specifies politics' main functions.
The fourth project inquires into the methods used by political theorists. It has produced the paper "On Styles of Dealing with Problems in Political Theory," (which I co-wrote with Paulina Ochoa Espejo).