My research concerns structures of normativity as we practice it, especially in domains beyond universal morality. In many areas of human life, we hold ourselves and each other to obligations, ideals, etc. and engage in praise and blame: aesthetic subcultures, clubs, games, personal relationships, roles, identities, etc. I aim to characterize these psychological and social normative structures and how we build and contest them, helping us elucidate everyday phenomena and evaluate what place non-moral normative concerns should have in our lives.
My projects tend to involve moral psychology, normative ethics, and social philosophy, along with related areas in philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, aesthetics, and metaethics.
My dissertation, Emotions and Communities (in progress), looks to the emotions to trace how we regulate our non-moral communities. Expanding the reactive attitudes literature, I argue that emotions can function to regulate all sorts of normative communities in all sorts of ways. I analyze recognizable emotional phenomena to show that reactive attitudes need not be focused on the moral community, directed towards fellow community members, or simply tracking existing community norms. On this approach, the emotions can reveal the logic of normativity in all the places we practice it.
Other projects of mine concern normative structures that shape our agency while lacking the inescapable and obligating force of morality, such as traditions, social identities, roles, and genres. I look for conceptions on which such structures can support rather than constrict our agency and flourishing.
I also like to think about how we should respond to the areas of each other's lives that are vulnerable or intimate yet remain possible sites for ethical development.
Sources that inform my work—to name a few particular favorites beyond generic analytic philosophy—include anti-theory, Aristotelian virtue ethics, Confucianism, feminist theory, Jewish tradition, linguistic anthropology, and ordinary language philosophy.
"Traditions and Perspectives," forthcoming at Free & Equal. I offer a novel function of traditions, centering occasional holidays and individual rituals rather than comprehensive ways of life. A good life involves balancing different values, but values compete for attention, and miscellaneous attentional pulls can lead to a life misspent. As regularized and sticky occurrences that prescribe specific actions, traditions can guide us into new normative perspectives even at moments when we’re unable to see the perspective’s appeal—helping ensure that all the values we care about get their due. Where prior accounts explain traditions in terms of interpersonal coordination, this account is intrapersonal, capturing a new range of cases and accounting for the particularities of traditions.
A paper on defiance (revise and resubmit)
A paper on aesthetic contempt (under review)
A paper on reactive attitudes and demands (under review)
A paper on contempt. Philosophers and psychologists of contempt disagree greatly on the scope of contempt’s object and on when contempt is justified. I take a novel approach: starting with cases of non-moral contempt, where someone is contemptible relative to the standards of a community smaller and less urgent than the moral community. I argue that contempt enforces a hierarchy of rank in any community--entitlements corresponding to status or standing--and contempt's justifiability depends on the importance of rank to that community. The theory extends from non-moral contempt to clean up the messier domain of moral contempt.
A paper on gender identity. Gender norms provide useful frames for agency, but they're also quite frequently oppressive. I propound a model on which one can commit to a gender as a source of identification and understanding without thereby committing to its oppressive norms. From an analogy with genre norms, we can think of gender norms as demanding engagement, not compliance: to inhabit a gender involves using that gender's norms as a frame of reference from which to build a suitable personal style--without any pressure to comply with any particular norm.
Earlier in development:
Breaking up and drifting apart: Some but not all personal relationships paradigmatically begin and end via explicit performatives. The distinction explains contemporary in-between phenomena and shows the difference made by overt commitment
Joyful valuing: There's a kind of "childlike" joy that responds to the serendipitous presence of a good. This joy is common in discretionary practices of valuing and can attract others to join—but an amateur approach to valuing may be needed to preserve opportunities for joy.
Authentic folk music: I construct a normative notion of authenticity for 21st-century American folk music. A performer should be both authentic to the genre of folk, invoking the norms and resources of the tradition, and authentic to themselves, invoking their temperament, background, values, etc.
Social normative moves: Speech acts, reactive attitudes, and normative powers can all be understood as conventionalized ways of altering socially understood normative facts. This comparison is fruitful for all three literatures.
Two approaches to illocutionary force: The debate over the role of the hearer in constituting a speech act's illocutionary force or success reflects two different theoretical projects that are interdependent rather than competing. We want to know both social-descriptive facts, centrally involving after-the-fact negotations, and normative facts, centrally involving intentions.
Sexual agencies: Often, the right way to model agency in erotic contexts is neither as a straightforward extension of everyday agency nor on the model of game agencies, but as expressing a part of the self.
Caring, intimacy, and cultural appropriation: Because our idiosyncratic valuing practices are vulnerable, others ought to respect and defer to our idiosyncratic construals of objects we value. A group-level version of this argument explains one dimension of cultural appropriation.