I research contemporary moral, political, and legal philosophy. My research interests are concentrated in four main areas, each of which overlaps considerably.
LGBTQ+ citizens and LGBTQ+ rights
My research focuses on LGBTQ+ citizens in liberal democracies. I seek to diagnose and ameliorate injustices affecting LGBTQ+ citizens in both the law and the family. That includes wrongful discrimination, conversion therapy, heterosexist parenting, and heterosexist schooling. I use the normative resources of public reason, as a substantive ideal of free and equal citizenship, to that end.
Public reason and political liberalism
The idea of public reason stipulates that laws must be reasonably acceptable to all citizens, but there are now many ways of cashing out that requirement. I adopt an interpretation of public reason (often called 'political liberalism') that requires laws to be justified in terms of the shared interests that constitute the freedom and equality of citizens in a liberal democracy. Public reason therefore precludes justifications for law that appeal to controversial, unshared conceptions of the good life that free and equal citizens reasonably disagree over.
The public reason framework I develop in my doctoral thesis aligns closely with the political liberalism of John Rawls, Samuel Freeman, Lori Watson, and Christie Hartley. It is distinctive for justifying LGBTQ+ rights in terms of the set of interests LGBTQ+ citizens share with religious citizens as free and equal members of a liberal democracy.
In doing so, my research disarms 'culture war' objections to LGBTQ+ rights rooted in socially conservative religious doctrines. Religious citizens need not reconcile with LGBTQ+ citizens over sexual morality or personal relationships to accept LGBTQ+ rights. They need not abandon their religious doctrine or integrity. Instead, LGBTQ+ rights are grounded in all citizens' shared values of freedom and equality, sidestepping reasonable disagreement over LGBTQ+ identities.
Fundamentally, my research shows how robust LGBTQ+ rights are possible without progressive sectarianism or religious alienation. Political liberalism orients legal justification toward the common good and shared democratic identity, treating religious and LGBTQ+ communities with moral even-handedness. That is an especially attractive virtue for any framework that purports to fairly resolve legal contests in our fractious age of identity politics.
The philosophy and law of discrimination
I am interested in both the concept of discrimination and the moral foundations of antidiscrimination law. I am currently developing the first political liberal theory of wrongful discrimination and antidiscrimination law. On my account, the great evil of discrimination is that it makes fair social cooperation between citizens impossible. Discriminatory acts express a message that some minority group is unfit, unable, or unwilling to fairly share in the benefits or burdens of public life. That might include employment, receiving commercial goods and services, enjoying state-funded benefits, or political participation. But no citizen can reasonably be expected to tolerate such messages in public life or social cooperation. Discrimination is an especially undignifying form of treatment for blocking the wholehearted participation of minority groups in the public life of their societies, with their full identity in tow.
This attractively parsimonious theory of discrimination has several interesting features. For instance, it suggests that the fundamental wrong of discrimination is essentially contractualist: discrimination is wrong for expressing a message that is unjustifiable to discriminatees as free equals, entitled to participate in social cooperation on fair terms. I also think popular accounts of discrimination that point to structural wrongs or relational wrongs can both be understood as disabling fair cooperation. My theory therefore seeks to unify existing accounts of discrimination by showing how they bottom out to a fundamental contractualist wrong.
I deploy this theory to adjudicate contentious claims for exemptions to LGBTQ+ antidiscrimination laws based on religious or expressive freedom, as in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Lee v Ashers, or 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. I use those cases to illustrate how antidiscrimination law is best interpreted as a set of guarantees or rights to social participation.
Shame and self-respect
I plan to develop a theory of when shame, as an attitude towards oneself, is warranted. My starting point is that shame is centrally connected to self-respect. Shame can both constitute as well as hinder our self-respect, understood as a proper sense of one's own worth and integrity as a moral agent. Whether shame forms part of self-respect or disrupts self-respect explains why and when shame is ultimately warranted.
Shame is warranted when and because it serves valuable protective and reactive functions as part of our self-respect. As a reactive attitude, shame amounts to seeing the 'real self'. Shame is a recognition that transgressing standards that we have autonomously chosen for ourselves does have bearing on who we are. That way, we retain self-respect in spite of our mistakes, for there is nothing self-respecting about remaining deluded about our conduct. As a protective attitude, shame keeps us on the straight and narrow. Shame bears on our sense of self in ways that disincline us from violating our moral standards in the future. The self-respecting person feels their shame to make it less likely they will betray themselves again.
Conversely, shame is likely to be unwarranted when it undermines our self-respect: when it leads us away from recognising and manifesting our worth and integrity as moral agents. Specifically, I hypothesise that shame loses its reactive and protective functions when it is not appropriately linked to the exercise of agency. Consider that shame is sometimes felt prior to choices being made, felt regardless of how well our choices turn out, or is disproportionate to the extent of a betrayal. In those cases, shame is a chronic, alien force in our lives. It is not properly aligned with or commensurate to how we have acted; it does not amount to an accurate evaluation of ourselves. Shame is unwarranted here, for it unmoors our sense of self from the reality of our moral lives, distorting our perception of our worth.
This misalignment can interfere with our moral powers and capacities in ways that degrade our worth and fracture our integrity as moral agents. When it does, shame fails to protect and support our agency; it is unwarranted. In previous research I have drawn examples of this from psychology and sociology. For instance, heterosexist and fatphobic upbringings empirically instil self-loathing for being LGBTQ+ and fat, prior to acquiring moral agency. Unable to recognise themselves as sources of moral value and goodness in the world, LGBTQ+ and fat adults may regard themselves as unworthy or incapable of identifying and pursuing valuable ends. That may explain why they disproportionately suffer from mental health problems, addiction, pursuit of external validation, overcompensation, people-pleasing, self-sabotage, poor boundary enforcement, and suicidal ideation.
I also plan to explore the personal, social, and legal implications of this theory. For instance, how can the popular psychology of 'self-compassion' be squared with the fact that shame is often warranted? Should schools shield children from shaming worldviews or parents? In developing the self-respect theory of shame, my research combines moral philosophy with psychology and sociology, as well as political and legal theory.
Other interests
Aside from the above, I am also interested in the ethics of parents and children, expressive wrongs, integrity, religious accommodation in law, the philosophy of John Rawls, and distributive justice.