Research

“Respecting the Oppressed in the Personal Autonomy Debate,” Philosophical Studies 178 (8): 2557-2578. 2020.

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect.

“Seeing Oneself as a Source of Reasons: Gaslighting, Oppression, and Autonomy,” Southwest Philosophy Review, 38 (1): 237-244. 2022 .

In this paper, I provide a novel account of gaslighting according to which gaslighting involves mistakenly failing to see oneself as a source of reasons with respect to some domain. I argue that this account does a nice job of explaining what’s gone wrong in various popular examples of gaslighting, and that it captures what different instances of gaslighting have in common even when they are quite different in other respects. I also show how this account of gaslighting explains a common intuition according to which gaslighting is autonomy-undermining—something other accounts, I argue, have failed to do. And finally, I show that this explanation of why gaslighting is autonomy-undermining also shows that certain forms of oppressive socialization are autonomy-undermining as well, thus providing us with an argument in favor of more substantive theories of autonomy according to which a certain kind of self-respect is necessary for autonomy. 

Paper on Autonomy and Self-Respect (Under Review)

[redacted during review process]

“An Agential Account of Gaslighting” (draft available upon request)

Many theorists in feminist philosophy and epistemology have recently turned their attention toward the project of explaining what gaslighting is, how it works, and why, exactly, it is bad. But while theorists agree that the concept is important, there is little agreement regarding what, exactly, gaslighting is. Different theorists provide accounts that seem to capture a limited range of examples, but none of these accounts, I will argue, are able to get at the heart of what all cases of gaslighting have in common that make them gaslighting. In this paper, I argue that gaslighting is best understood in terms of the phenomenology of the victim. When we turn our attention to the victim’s experience, we see that gaslighting causes them to lose their grasp on themselves as a source of reasons in some domain. They experience a loss of confidence in their perception, memory, values, or sense of themselves as mattering in certain ways, and this loss is significant enough that the victim no longer clearly sees these things as generating reasons for action. I argue that this account explains what other accounts of gaslighting share in common because it gets at the heart of what gaslighting is.

"Against Workplace Dress Codes" (draft available upon request)

I argue int his paper that employers are morally justified only in maintaining what I call a Minimal Dress Code: the least restrictive dress code that is necessary for 1) protecting other employees from ideas and messages that contribute to a hostile work environment, and 2) maintaining the basic functioning of the workplace (e.g. by allowing customers to identify who the employees are or maintaining workplace safety).  I provide two arguments for a Minimal Dress Code. Argument I shows that dress codes that go beyond a Minimal Dress Code are dehumanizing and degrading to employees because they involve employers exerting excessive power over them. Argument II appeals to the moral importance of self-expression and the role it plays for humans in achieving several other important goods, like self-respect, self-discovery and creation, and recognition by others. Undermining people’s ability to pursue these goods constitutes a significant moral harm that employers should aim to avoid.