Research

My research is in ethics. In general, I try to understand and assess normative phenomena as they pertain to both our intrapersonal and interpersonal lives. This includes reactive attitudes, emotional expression, speech acts, social norms and roles, and the structure of normativity generally. Such projects tend to cut across normative ethics, moral psychology, metaethics, and/or social philosophy—and sometimes related areas in philosophy of language or aesthetics.

My home is in analytic philosophy. Other important influences include (alphabetically): Aristotle, Confucianism, feminist theory, Jewish tradition/philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and Wittgenstein.

Projects in progress:

A paper on contempt. A reactive attitude recognizable as contempt characterizes one way we treat others in non-moral communities. Non-moral contempt tells us new things about both contempt—common objections to contempt turn out to only apply to its harshest forms—and about the distribution of rank, and the importance of rank, in our various normative communities.

A paper on expressive ethics. Expressing fitting attitudes is morally good. But expression is only comprehensible given social mores about what actions expresses what attitudes and what objects merit what attitudes, and these mores may be flawed. How exactly can expression go wrong, how can it be fixed, and what should we do in the meantime? The answers, derived from the Confucian tradition, show the importance of expressive ethics in societal moral improvement.

A paper on caring and cultural appropriation. Recent literature explains cultural appropriation as a violation of group intimacy. But one relevant and familiar wrong is missing from the discussion: the wrong of failing to respect that an object is personally, affectively important to someone. In certain circumstances, my caring about an object gives you reason to understand that object the way I'd like you to. Extended to groups, this fact helps explain some intuitions about appropriation.

A paper on tradition. When we act from a certain perspective on what's valuable, we can lose sight of reasons to switch to other perspectives we find important. Traditions can provide regular interruptions that function to guide one into a new perspective. This explanation fits with known features of tradition; it applies to an under-theorized sort of tradition which is overt and occasional instead of a pervasive part of our everyday thinking.

You can also ask me about (less-developed projects):