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.
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.
[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.
[work in progress]
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.
[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)