My research lays out the workings of practices of normativity, 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 aesthetics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of language, 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 they 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 contempt (under review)
A paper on aesthetic contempt (under review)
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.
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.
You can also ask me about (other projects):
The role of explicit performatives in starting and ending personal relationships
Authentic folk music
Normative vs. social descriptive approaches to determining illocutionary force
Joy and amateurism in building idiosyncratic valuing communities
Varieties of affective resistance
Sexual agencies
Caring, intimacy, and cultural appropriation
Privacy and guilty pleasures