Research

"Do good people love themselves? On rational self-love in Kant." Kant-Studien, 115(4), 2024: 433-453. Preprint available here.

Kant is usually taken to be an opponent of self-love in general and to regard it merely as self-interestedness or selfishness. I show that this is mistaken. Kant has an elaborate taxonomy of self-love which admits of both immoral (selfish) and moral varieties. The right kind of self-love - 'self-contentment' - is an important part of the successful moral life. Thus, while for morally bad agents self-love and morality inevitably conflict, good agents can and should love themselves.

Book reviews:

“Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Beyond Duty: Kantian Ideals of Respect, Beneficence, and Appreciation.” Utilitas, 35(2), 2023: 164-167.
“Critical notice of Allen W. Wood, Kant and Religion.” Kant-Studien, 113(1), 2022: 161-173.

Translation:

Selections from Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Russ Shafer-Landau, Living Ethics: An Introduction with Readings, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press), 2024. Translation commissioned to be maximally accessible to beginning readers.

Full drafts available upon request.

Paper on Kant's view of moral weakness (title redacted while under review.)

Kant's interpreters have struggled to make sense of the possibility of (moral) weakness of will in his action theory. This is largely because of widespread commitment to a particular reading of the 'Incorporation Thesis', which reduces all motivation to an act of normative endorsement. This makes it look impossible for our motivations to become misaligned with our principles, as is required for weakness. I show that this reading is undermotivated, and offer an alternative understanding of Kant's action theory (drawing from my dissertation) on which the possibility of this misalignment follows naturally. I then show how, while Kant can hold that not all weakness is imputable, moral weakness always is.

"Kant, Mendelssohn, and the possibility of atemporal change."

Based on ch. 4 of the dissertation. Kant believes we can 'change our heart' from evil to good. This seems to commit him to the possibility of change at the intelligible level, i.e. outside of time. I show that previous 'deflationary' interpretations cannot avoid explaining how such atemporal change is possible. Though Kant holds that it is a matter of 'practical belief', we can only believe in what is logically possible; and atemporal change appears logically contradictory. I then show how Kant can avoid this contradiction using a model of atemporal succession first suggested to him by Moses Mendelssohn, in which temporal relations are replaced by relative distance relations between grounds and their various consequences.

"Kant's concept of the heart and its development."

Based on ch. 5 of the dissertation. I show that the 'heart' is an important, underappreciated technical term in Kant's Religion, which connects our intelligible to our sensible side - making it possible for our abstract choice of our moral nature to affect our emotional and motivational profile in the empirical world. Drawing on student notes from years of his lectures on anthropology, I show how Kant developed this concept over a long time, but eventually came to see it as a moral - not merely descriptively anthropological - term. His quiet reappropriation of the term from his Pietist environment shows the increased importance of our affective, emotional side for Kant's mature moral philosophy.

"Self-forgiveness: inspirations from Kant."

I articulate two challenges from recent literature on self-forgiveness. The standing challenge alleges that self-forgiveness is not conceptually possible, because we can never have standing to forgive ourselves. The appropriateness challenge holds that self-forgiveness is never appropriate, because it is morally pernicious: we let ourselves off the hook too easily. I then show how resources from Kant's view of divine grace and self-forgiveness allow us to meet these challenges. We wrong not only others, but also ourselves, by doing bad. This gives us standing against ourselves as a victim of our own wrongdoing. While the Kantian view admits that self-forgiveness is morally perilous, it also allows the possibility of a genuine change of heart. If we are able to change who we are, then it is not only appropriate, but important that we can forgive ourselves for who we used to be.

Dissertation - "Finite, feeling, but free: Kant on evil and action."
Committee: Eric Watkins, Lucy Allais (co-chairs), Dana Nelkin, Clinton Tolley, Piotr Winkielmann (Psychology). 

My dissertation investigates Kant’s explanation of evil action. Dominant ‘intellectualist’ readings of Kant’s action theory sharply separate rational judgment from motivation and argue that agents only act on motivations which they judge to be good. This yields implausible explanations of evil action and unduly downplays Kant’s well-developed efficient-causal theory of motivation. I develop and defend an alternative ‘layered conativist’ interpretation. It is conativist in that our actions are ultimately caused by our strongest desires. It is layered in that both efficient-causal motivation and normative judgment contribute to determining what our strongest desires are. Far from being isolated, the interaction between these ‘layers’ explains why we act as we do. This interaction is made possible by Kant’s radical view that we freely choose our own nature and are thereby responsible for our motivations. The result is a more well-rounded view of human agency, which does better justice to the roles of feeling and motivation in Kant’s moral theory and explains a wider range of evil actions.

Part I develops a new layered reading of Kant’s action theory. At the ‘efficient-causal’ layer, we are determined to act by our strongest motivating grounds, which are always based on feeling. At the ‘normative’ layer, we formulate ‘maxims’ which express our endorsement of motivating grounds as good. A special motivating ground, ‘character’, mediates between the two layers. Part II argues that agents freely choose their own nature at a third, ‘intelligible’ layer. I offer the first metaphysically robust explanation of how it is possible for this choice to be outside of time and yet subject to change. This intelligible choice for good or evil connects with our particular sensible nature in Kant’s oft-neglected concept of ‘heart.’ Morality accordingly must speak not just to our reason, but our whole heart. Part III shows how the resulting picture explains the range of evil actions. Reading Kant’s three ‘stages’ of evil as different stages of the heart yields a comprehensive taxonomy of evil action. In particular, layered conativism naturally and plausibly explains the first stage, ‘frailty’ or weakness of will, which extant interpretations have struggled to account for.

Individual chapters are available upon request.

"Being without limit: radical evil and the desire to 'be like God.'"

Based on ch. 8 of the dissertation. Why do all human beings choose evil according to Kant? I reconstruct his infamously 'missing' explanation of this universality by developing a Kantian reading of a classic, Biblical answer: human beings want to 'be like God.' That is, we try to make the world conform to our will in all respects, rather than accept that our will must at times conform to the world. In doing so we deny our own finitude. I thus offer an explanation which, while not explicit in Kant, fits his understanding of the human being and his theory of happiness, and shows the deep continuity between his thought and that of the rationalist religious tradition he inherits.

"The mere limitation theory of prime matter in Leibniz."

I defend the view that for Leibniz, matter emerges from lack or imperfection; in other words, it is not a reality. This seems incompatible with Leibniz’s physics, in which he appears to attribute positive properties like impenetrability to matter. I show how these properties can nevertheless be grounded in negation. This paper ties into wider, developing interests in the legacy of Neoplatonism, and particularly its apparent equation of evil, matter, and nothingness, in the modern tradition; and in the use of privation and limitation as explanatory concepts.

"The possibility of aesthetic accountability"

I develop an account of aesthetic wrongs for which agents can be held accountable. That is to say that, for instance, the makers of the infamously disappointing final Game of Thrones season are open to more than aesthetic criticism; they can be blamed for violating an aesthetic obligation to the show’s fans. I show that such obligations cannot be reduced to moral or other obligations, but are fundamentally aesthetic in nature. I also argue that they function differently than moral obligations, especially with regard to the 'control condition' that holds for the latter.