Research
My research covers a number of topics in moral and political philosophy. Underlying all of these issues is my interest in understanding the normative working of our social practices and how they further or inhibit our concerns as agents and the interpersonal relationships that are central to our lives.
Publications
'Begging & Power', Philosophical Studies (2024)
I identify a central form of begging which constitutively involves communicating one’s relative powerlessness as a means of motivating one’s target to act. When begging of this kind is bad for the beggar herself, this is so because either (i) the invoked powerlessness is bad for the beggar and thereby gives the action a negative evaluative meaning, or (ii) the invoked powerlessness is good/neutral, but the act of begging precludes or replaces valuable ways of interacting that the parties have reasons to care about in the context. In a slogan, the badness of begging revolves around power and helplessness.
In Progress
Paper on Wrongful Requests -- (submitted for publication title omitted)
Some requests are wrongful qua request in the sense that their wrongfulness depends fundamentally on the fact that they were made rather than subsequent harms they may cause. If wrong for an employer to ask their employee for a backrub in the workplace regardless of whether the employee is insulted, pressured, or harmed in any ordinary way. I defend an expression-based view of such wrongful requests that characterizes them as attempted abuses of a normative power. Making such a request expresses, in virtue of the kind of speech-act that it is, a lack of due consideration or regard for one’s target as a member of some relationship that you have which them and which is invoked in the making of the request.
Paper on Reason-Giving Force of Requests -- (submitted for publication; title omitted)
I pose three questions about our social practice of requesting: (1) What kind of speech-act is performed in making a request?, (2) How demanding are our reasons to grant requests?, and (3) What explains why we ever have reasons to grant requests? In response to (1), I argue that making a request involves an attempted exercise of a normative power, which is an ability to intentionally effect a normative change by communicating the intention to do so. In response to (2), I argue that request-based reasons have a “low stakes” deontic character that affords requestees significant deliberative discretion about whether to comply. In response to (3), I defend a relational view according to which the power to request is a valuable tool for conducting our interpersonal relationships on terms that realize important interests in autonomy, recognition, and equality.
Paper on Political Obligation -- (submitted for publication; title omitted)
I defend the Recognitional Account of political obligation (i.e. a general obligation to obey the law as such) which consists of the following three claims: (i) citizens of a liberal polity have obligations to recognize one another as free and equal moral members of their own political community and express this recognition, (ii) under certain conditions, having respect for the law of one’s own state is a crucially important way of affording others this kind of recognition, and so we are obliged, as citizens, to have such respect, and (iii) being obligated to have respect for the law entails having a general obligation to obey it. Taken jointly, these claims show how the following three concepts – political recognition, respect for law, and political obligation – are united in a normative nexus which yields a demanding but deeply attractive interpersonal ideal for political life.
The Expressive Value of Petitionary Prayer
Petitionary prayer involves making a request of God or some divine entity. Many have argued that God has certain features that make petitionary prayer either incoherent or valueless (e.g. immutability, impassability, and omniscience). In this paper, I argue that an acceptable account of the nature and value of petitionary prayer should establish some connections with our ordinary practices of requesting. Drawing on my work in Requests & Relationships, I argue that petitionary prayer is a coherent and valuable activity even if God is immutable, impassable, and omniscient. In particular, I claim that petitionary prayer, when properly performed, expresses the value you ascribe to your relationship with God. I further argue that this explains what’s problematic about praying that God perform “evil actions” such as killing your business rival even if there’s no chance that God would grant this request.
The Injustice of Anti-Begging Legislation
Many American jurisdictions have enacted legislation which criminalizes begging in various contexts. I consider a number of arguments for the injustice of such statutes including: (1) that they involve an unjustifiable regulation of speech, (2) that they unjustly regulate protected forms of market exchange, and (3) that they unjustly interfere with a person’s way of earning a living. I argue that each suffers from fatal defects and that none can adequately account for the negative value of the practice of begging. Drawing on my claims in The Badness of Begging, I argue instead that the injustice of anti-begging statutes should be explained by how they target the homeless and poor in a way that both (i) is not rationally related to a legitimate government purpose, and (ii) adds both insult and further injury to those who already have so little and are likely to have been harmed by other failures of justice. Such legislation expresses an oddly demeaning and cynical message which is at odds with egalitarian values. I further argue that an important interpersonal ideal of justice dictates that the state must lessen citizens’ incentives to relate to one another on inegalitarian terms. The state is therefore required to weaken peoples’ incentives to beg on the street, but anti-begging legislation is an unacceptable way of satisfying this requirement.
Love in the Time of AI
A recent media article claims that millions are using apps that provide virtual AI girlfriends that will “talk to you, love you, allow you to live out your erotic fantasies, and learn, through data, exactly what you like and don’t like, creating the ‘perfect’ relationship.” In this paper, I identify three valuable elements of loving romantic relationships that cannot (or are extremely unlikely to) be present in relationships with AI systems. First, in loving another, their interests necessarily become your interests. This shared well-being enables the lover to identify, in one important sense, with their beloved. But in order for this sharing to occur, the interests of the participants, considered as individuals, must be sufficiently similar in terms of their types. Current AI systems might have interests, even ones that provide reasons to treat them in some ways and not others, but the types of interests they have are dissimilar enough from those of ordinary humans that the shared well-being of love cannot obtain. Second, love constitutively aims at forming a kind of plural subject – what Robert Nozick calls a We – which is a key element of what makes certain forms of love distinctively valuable for us. But to form such a plural subject with another, both individuals must possess certain kinds of autonomy and independence that can be pooled and partially ceded to one another. And current AI systems do not have the requisite forms of autonomy/independence needed to form such a plural subject. Third, there’s a problem of individuation. Love constitutively involves loving a particular individual such that one isn’t willing to “trade up” and look for another with “better” characteristics. But it’s difficult to see how to individuate AI systems such that the valuable particularity of love can be secured. So while relationships with AI systems might be valuable in many different ways, such relationships will lack three important elements of valuable love between persons. Because of this, we have reasons to be wary about the unrestrained rise of the AI romantic partner.