Most of my work is in ethics, broadly construed – especially normative ethics and moral psychology. I also have interests in epistemology 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.
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.
In the philosophical literature, it’s popular to suggest that internal conflict has negative consequences for our agency (Frankfurt 1988), our self-understanding (MacIntyre 1981), and our relationships (Korsgaard 2009). In this paper, I cast internal conflict in a new light, arguing that, in some cases, it plays an important role in our close interpersonal relationships.
We sometimes find ourselves in situations where no matter what we do, we sacrifice something important to us. I argue that when these tragic choices involve another person, the good of our relationship depends on us being conflicted. When we fail to be conflicted, we alienate ourselves from the other person and from our commitment to them. The upshot is that internal conflict can be a necessary component of flourishing relationships, and, in fact, well-functioning agency. While theories of agency recommend we aim to unify our will so as to be wholehearted, doing so can undermine our relationships.
Philosophers and laypeople alike often treat introspective clarity about what we want as a virtue and murky or unsettled desires as signs of trouble. This assumption is especially forceful in the sexual domain, where uncertainty seems to make us especially vulnerable to wrongs and otherwise unpleasant experiences. The folk wisdom – clarified in some theories of sexual ethics – is that sex is made better by clarity and worse by murkiness.
I challenge this picture by examining a neglected class of desires that sit between wholehearted wanting and aversion, which I call “murky wants.” Far from being mere deficits in self-knowledge, murky wants can be sources of distinctive individual and relational goods. They can enrich experience, broaden our tolerance for uncertainty, support attunement, and play a constructive role in forming joint intentions. These goods are not entailed by murky wants, but they are neither rare nor peripheral.
Taking murky wants seriously has important implications for how we think about a range of issues, including permissibility, consent, and authenticity. Murkiness is part of the ordinary texture of wanting, and acknowledging its value helps us understand our desires and our moral landscapes more fully.
[work in progress]
Imagine a couple, Pablo and Harriet; Harriet wants to move to Spain, while Pablo prefers to stay in the U.S. There are many ways the couple can go about trying to reach an agreement: They can try to convince each other; one of them can acquiesce; they can negotiate. In this paper, I show that all of these approaches fall short of an ideal for intimate relationships. I sketch an alternative approach to joint deliberation that involves each person taking on the other’s motivational perspective. This sort of joint deliberation avoids the alienating pitfalls of convincing, acquiescence, and negotiating. It also results in internal conflict for both Pablo and Harriet, such that they each both want to and want not to move to Spain. The result is a model of intimate joint deliberation in which internal conflict is not a flaw, but an essential and constructive feature.
* 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)