I am interested in the relationship between agency, autonomy, and the social and technological structures that organize human activity. Two current projects I am working on in this vein: (a) a Kantian defense of something I call moral stewardship (the individual responsibility we have for how our actions uphold or erode morally problematic social practices); and (b) the ethics of persuasion as it pertains to persuasive technologies and online manipulation.

I am also interested in attitudes like awe, love, and play -- and how they shape the ways in which we relate -- to each other, to nature, to ideals, to activities, and to ourselves.  I am currently working through some of these thoughts in the context of environmental ethics, examining the practice of "peak bagging" and how it shapes our relationship to nature.

Publications 

“Moral Reasoning for Finite Sensible Beings Like Us,” Proceedings of the 12th International Kant Congress: Nature and Freedom. Ed. Violetta L. Waibel and Margit Ruffing. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. 

Dissertation Abstract

In my dissertation, I defend and develop a social and relational account of Kantian autonomy. I argue that the standard account of Kantian rational autonomy, understood merely as the capacity to set and pursue one’s own ends constrained by respect for others to do the same, cannot: (1) make sense of the intersubjective aspects attributed to rational agency by most Kantians; and (2) respond to concerns of individualism, worries rooted in skepticism about any normative theory that abstracts away from or ignores the social-embeddedness of human life. I suggest that the realization of Kantian autonomy, like Rousseau’s moral freedom, involves not only a relationship between an agent and her actions, but a further relation to the principles and ends that structure the activities and practices she shares with others. Rousseau’s crucial insight (one I believe is present but overlooked in Kant) was that, given that we must act together, there is a distinctively social dimension to human freedom: the principles and ends structuring our shared ways of life can be experienced by individual members as either foreign impediments to their wills or as principles they have given themselves. Full freedom requires the latter. On my proposed reading, which I call Kantian Social Constructivism, Kantian autonomy is partly constituted by participation in an interpersonal discursive practice through which agents jointly construct, negotiate, and institute shareable ways of life, i.e. ways of life that all participants, as free and equal, could will as their own.

I show how this reading of Kantian autonomy not only dramatically expands what we can do with Kantian theory but also helps the Kantian respond to worries of individualism and make good on her own commitments. It also suggests that Kantian morality involves participating in the collective and ongoing task of bringing about and maintaining a social world that enables and exhibits the autonomy of all its members. In the final chapter, I argue from Kantian grounds that we have a distinctive set of duties regarding the moral upkeep of our social practices. I call these duties of moral stewardship.

Papers in Progress 

“Moral Stewardship: the Grounds of Moral Community and the Duties of Upkeep”

Introduces and defends the notion of moral stewardship: the idea that we have a moral responsibility for the upkeep of social norms and practices such that they reflect the moral equality of persons. 

"Paying or Stealing Attention: Persuasive Technologies"

A Kantian diagnosis of attention hacking, the tech industry's practice of targeting known psychological vulnerabilities in human users in order to keep their attention.