Most of my work is in ethics, broadly construed – especially normative ethics and moral psychology. I also have interests in epistemology and social and political philosophy. My dissertation defends the concepts of ambivalence and internal conflict, arguing that they can be ethically valuable and play an important role in our close relationships. More generally, I'm interested in the ethical problems that arise when imperfect creatures like us are in close interpersonal relationships.
[work in progress]
[under review]
This paper introduces the concept ‘murky wants.’ These wants are either epistemically opaque (the agent doesn’t know what she wants), or metaphysically indeterminate (there’s no fact of the matter about what she wants). I explore the affective and structural components of murky wants before considering how murky wants challenge conventional wisdom, particularly in the realm of sexual ethics.
I object to a family of views which hold that consent is central to sexual ethics. It’s a familiar point that if we interpret consent thinly, we overlook ethically important features of sex. I argue that we cannot preserve the central role of consent by ‘thickening’ consent. Thick consent miscategorizes all instances of sex involving murky wants as ethically impermissible and leads to other problems, including discouraging valuable exploration. Ultimately, I use murky wants to illuminate ethically significant aspects of sex that are overlooked when we focus only on consent.
[under review]
Sometimes, it is simply too costly to use a concept. This paper offers an account of the epistemic harms incurred when we can’t use the concepts we possess. I use the example of unacknowledged rape, where the victim faces undue social, practical, and psychological costs in using the concept ‘rape’ to identify the nature of their own assault. I argue that one consequence of these costs is that a person might lose their ability to use the concept. When such costs unjustly impede a person’s ability to use concepts they possess, the harms are uniquely epistemic. Discussions of epistemic injustice have largely focused on developing and distributing necessary conceptual resources or ensuring that a speaker’s testimony is heard by competent audiences. These interventions are crucial, but they do not exhaust the demands of epistemic justice. As this paper shows, using the concepts that we already possess, regardless of audience competence, can come with serious costs, some of which are epistemically unjust. To recognize these harms, epistemic justice requires attending to, and sometimes lowering the practical costs of using our concepts. I discuss some practical ways we might do this.
* Feel free to email me for a draft!
"Can We Get Better at Enjoying Art?" (Blog of the APA)
"Philosophy as a Team Sport" (with Kai Milanovich, Blog of the APA)