My research is in ethics. In general, I try to understand normative phenomena as they span our intrapersonal and interpersonal lives. Such projects tend to involve moral psychology, normative ethics, and social philosophy, along with related areas in aesthetics, philosophy of language, and metaethics.
My dissertation (in progress) expands and reorients the reactive attitudes paradigm to focus on "community-regulating attitudes" that don't just reinforce the moral community but manage all sorts of normative communities in all sorts of ways. I analyze recognizable emotional phenomena to show that not all reactive attitudes are limited to the moral community, directed towards fellow community members, or inclined towards strengthening community. We're left with a new way to look at emotions and communities as sites for normativity as we practice it.
Other projects of mine focus on how social normative concepts weaker than morality—traditions, social identities, genres—can help shape individual lives, providing structure for normative commitments while leaving room for agency and multiplicity.
My training is primarily in analytic philosophy. Other sources I'm indebted to include Aristotle, Confucianism, feminist theory, Jewish tradition/philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and Wittgenstein.
A paper on contempt (under review)
A paper on traditions (under review)
A paper on aesthetic contempt (under review)
A paper on defiance. What does an act of defiance do? Why defy someone rather than ignoring them or just disagreeing? Using tools from the reactive attitudes and speech act literatures, defiance can be understood as a refusal that denies the authority of a prior act. Defiance moves beyond the reactive attitudes as currently theorized to consider emotional communications that sever rather than repair community connections. The analysis, when broadened, can also capture a wide array of the diverse phenomena characterized as defiant.
A paper on social identities. How ought individuals respond to the normative baggage that comes with their identities? I first argue that this individual-level question is an important complement to social-level debates about identities. I then identify a new normative structure for how one might relate to identity norms: rather than complying with, defying, ignoring, or playing with norms, we might engage with them as part of a "tradition," on which a set of norms serves as a frame for understanding but allows any relation to any particular norm. For a range of familiar cases, approaching identities as traditions is the best option, allowing for stable commitment and aiding in individualized ethical development without unduly limiting one's options.
A paper on reactive attitudes and demands. Reactive attitudes are often thought of as demands. But while Strawsonian reactive attitudes rest on a "basic demand" for goodwill, they do not characteristically take the illocutionary form of demands. Any reactive attitude can be expressed either as a directive such as demand, pressuring the other for acknowledgement and (if needed) repair, or as a verdictive, simply making clear the moral facts. Both forms of expression make sense because whether any act violates the basic demand for goodwill depends on the nature of the relationship within which the act occurs—and that relationship can change, sometimes in response to an act that would violate relationship norms. We can either pressure for a return to the relationship's prior terms or instead accept the possibility of a reduced relationship. This spectrum of optional responses produces an improved picture of what exactly the basic demand asks of us.
A paper on caring, intimacy, and cultural appropriation. When an object is personally, affectively important to a person, others should act in ways that leave room for and properly attend to the person's construal of the object. I outline the scope of this "should" via a theory of disalignment from personal objects, then extend it to first give a theory of intimate objects and then explain a possible wrong of cultural appropriation that's rooted in group intimacy.
You can also ask me about (less developed projects):
Normative communities
Authentic folk music