Overview
My research focuses on the nature of and the relationship between personal autonomy, oppression, and (self-) respect. I think that self-respect is necessary for full autonomous agency, and that oppressive socialization often undermines autonomy by undermining self-respect. I have argued for the thesis that self-respect is necessary for autonomy in "Autonomy as Self-Respecting Self-Guidance" (forthcoming). Some worry that it is disrespectful to the oppressed to argue that oppression tends to undermine autonomy, so I respond to this kind of objection to my perspective in "Respecting the Oppressed in the Personal Autonomy Debate" (2020). In a paper that is currently under view, I consider the nature of internalized oppression and argue that it undermines authenticity by cutting its victims off from central facts about themselves having to do with their worth as persons.
My interest in self-respect has also led me to consider questions having to do with gaslighting, the value of self-expression, and the nature of healthy loving relationships. Regarding gaslighting, I have argued that gaslighting undermines agency by undermining the victim's responsiveness to their own practical and theoretical reasoning capacities. Regarding self-expression, I have argued that self-expression is an important component of many people's lives, and that resistance to restrictions on our ability to express ourselves through our appearance can be (and often is) an expression of self-respect. Regarding loving relationships, I am currently thinking about what I see as the tension between loving others well, on the one hand, and respecting oneself, on the other. I am developing the thesis that, even in the best of relationships, there will be tension between loving well and respecting oneself. In addition, I am interested in the special obligations that arise when others love us, as their love for us makes them especially vulnerable and in the care we need to take when we make requests of others - especially those who love us.
Publications
“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.
"Autonomy as Self-Respecting Self-Guidance," Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Forthcoming.
In this paper, I develop the beginnings of a self-respect-based account of personal autonomy that conceptualizes self-respect as central to autonomous agency. On the account I develop, autonomous self-guidance involves a recognition of and responsiveness to the relevant features of our selves – our moral status, rational capacities, and individuality. In developing this account, I argue that other self-regarding attitudes that are often appealed to in discussions of autonomy – like self-trust and self-esteem – are best understood as facets of self-respect. By conceptualizing self-respect in this broader sense, we are better able to understand these various self-regarding attitudes and their relationship to autonomy. In addition, I argue that this theory of autonomy provides us with a wider range of conceptual tools than other theories have available for understanding how oppression can impact autonomy, including in cases of adaptive preferences, internalized oppression, and self-abnegation.
"Self-trust, Respect, and Gaslighting," in Apisteology: The Study of Not-Believing, edited by Jack David Eller. Routledge. Forthcoming.
Discussions of gaslighting have increased substantially in recent years, with disagreements regarding what the gaslighter does wrong, as well as how gaslighting harms its victims. It has also become a common term in popular discourse, which often seems to conflate it with phenomena like lying or bullshitting. In spite of these potential sources of confusion, it is clear that interpersonal gaslighting is a moral wrong, that it undermines the victim’s confidence in some of their beliefs, and that it disrupts their belief-forming processes. An adequate account of gaslighting should capture these features of the phenomenon, and should articulate what makes it distinctive. Toward this end, this paper develops an account of agential recognition respect, which involves respecting the capacity for both epistemic and practical agency in others (and in oneself). It argues that gaslighters fail to show agential recognition respect to their victims, and as a result, victims lose agential recognition respect for themselves in that they suddenly worry that they are not capable of tracking normative reasons to believe, feel, value, choose, etc. Thus, gaslighting harms the self-trust of the victim by causing her to lose her trust in her capacity as an epistemic or/or practical agent.
Works in Progress
Paper on Internalized Oppression and Autonomy
[redacted during review process]
Paper on Gaslighting and Agency
[redacted during review process]
Paper on Dress Codes, Self-Expression, and Self-Respect
[redacted during review process]
"The Ethics of Asking"
It’s common in contexts of self-help and advice-giving to hear that “it doesn’t hurt to ask” – advice that may surprise those who have ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted request. Requestees often acquiesce to unwanted requests precisely because the act of declining can be so psychologically difficult and emotionally painful to the requestee. In some instances – especially those in which the request is unreasonable – being presented with the request itself can be painful, before one even begins considering how to respond. Thus, asking can hurt, making requesting morally risky. In this paper, I argue that requests are morally risky in this way because a) they communicate more than just the request itself, and b) they put the requestee in a position such that they must respond to the request, which can, for good reason, be difficult and even painful.
"Loving Well without Losing Oneself: On Balancing Love with Self-Respect"
In the context of philosophical discussion of love, appeals to self-respect usually only come up when it seems that something has gone wrong with the relationship. Perhaps self-respect is needed when love is not reciprocal, or when one party in the relationship is not contributing fairly to what is needed to maintain their shared life. But when the topic is the ideal loving relationship, self-respect is usually considered irrelevant. It seems to me that this is a mistake, and that healthy, loving relationships require both self-respect and love. I argue that we need a robust sense of self-respect to protect against losing ourselves in love, even when that love is reciprocal. This suggests that the normative demands of self-respect and the normative demands of love are often pulling in different directions, and that there will be tension between these things even in the best of relationships. In fact, this tension is inevitable in good relationships, since the absence of this tension suggests that one party is letting their perspective be lost for the sake of love.
"Respecting Those Who Love Us: Avoiding Exploitation without Paternalism"
When others love us, they are willing to do things for us that they otherwise would not be, and they will be more inclined take up our perspective as their own. As a result of this vulnerability, I argue that we have special obligations to those who love us whether the love is reciprocal or not. These obligations involve at least two components. First, we ought to protect the stability of their perspective by taking it seriously ourselves. Second, we ought to avoid exploiting their love for us by, for example, not asking them to make certain sacrifices for us. Since we have these obligations to those who love us whether or not we love them back, our obligations to them are best understood not in terms of love, but in terms of respect.