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 (prospectus in progress) will be an expansion and reorientation of the reactive attitudes paradigm. 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 core way to understand the social functions of emotions: as attempts to regulate the normative structures of a normative community of any kind.
Other projects of mine focus on how social normative concepts weaker than morality—traditions, social identities, genres—can give structure to individual lives, for good or ill.
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. 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 hierarchies of rank in our various normative communities. Ultimately, the reactive attitudes seem able to respond to all communities with norms we care about, and their presence or absence can tell us what aspects of normativity matter to that community.
A paper on traditions. Why might occasional traditions—regularized interruptions to routine like holidays—be valuable? We often try to balance various values across a life, but attentional pulls can draw us into the perspective of one or another value more often than we'd like. Occasional traditions can intervene as non-instrumentally-valued redirections of attention that create space for values.
A paper on defiance. What does an act of defiance do? Why defy someone rather than ignoring them or just disagreeing? I provide an analysis of defiance, using tools from the reactive attitudes and speech acts literatures. 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 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 ground this claim in the importance of caring for identity and well-being, and explain its scope via a theory of 'disalignment' from 'personal objects.' I then extend from the basic case to explain intimate objects and further to explain a possible wrong of cultural appropriation rooted in group intimacy.
You can also ask me about (less-developed projects):
Community-proleptic reactive attitudes
Normative communities
Social identities as traditions/genres
Confucian expressive ethics
Authentic folk music
Improvement from thorough vice in Aristotle