*this page will be updated...soonish!

{Papers}

"Rethinking the Imposter Phenomenon" (2019), Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22: 205–218

{Papers in progress}

“Grit Culture”

Here I consider how valuing grit can perpetuate injustice by shaping perceptions about failure and quitting. Considerations of grit, both academic and popular, usually focus on the goodness of grit for the individual who possesses it. Individuals who possess grit tend to succeed, and so you, you can be successful if you can cultivate grit. The central innovation of this article is to widen the lens through which grit is examined by thinking about and ultimately criticizing the ethos that is created in a society where grit is widely revered. (This essay draws on Sarah Paul and Jen Morton's recent paper on grit.)

“Grit, Difficult Action, and Self-confidence”

“Imagination and Experience in ‘Transformative Choice’”

When thinking about something that we haven't experienced, we must imagine what it will be like. When we think about something that we have experienced before, we remember what it was like. Here I draw out some of the ways in which imagining resembles remembering, especially in the context of deliberation. Given these similarities, I argue that we are not necessarily epistemically worse off when we are choosing a new experience. Whether we are depends on how skillful we are at remembering and imagining. 

“The Deliberative Insignificance of ‘Ought Implies Can’”

The principle 'ought implies can' implies that if you cannot do something, then it is not the case that you ought to do it. Can we use this principle in practical deliberation to rule out purported moral obligations on the grounds that we are unable to fulfill them? I argue that we often cannot because it is often very hard to acquire the justified belief that we cannot fulfill some candidate obligation. This follows from the general fact that it is often very hard for us to discern our own inabilities. I conclude with a brief consideration of a natural next question: When we're in the dark about our own abilities, is it our duty to be conservative or aspirational about them? 

“On the Moral and Epistemic Authority of Subjective Experience” 

This paper examines the connection between one's own experience and moral knowledge.  I question whether personal experience is necessary (as suggested by L.A. Paul in her work on transformative experience) or even sufficient (as some feminist theorists seem to suggest), offering a skeptical view on both fronts. I then consider whether, despite not being a moral-epistemic authority given your own experience, you may nonetheless be morally entitled to certain kinds of deference from others. 

“Inclusiveness in Philosophy and the Problem of Class” 

In this paper, I draw on empirical research on "genius culture" to argue that philosophy may be more exclusionary of individuals from working class and poor backgrounds than other academic disciplines.  I also canvass some of the difficulties with addressing skewed class representation in academia. 

“Transformative Choice and Indeterminate Values” (w/ Reuben Stern)

Building on Collins (2015), we develop a decision-theoretic framework that uses sets of utility functions to model the way in which agents are neutral about how much they value possible outcomes when making epistemically transformative choices. We then use this framework to offer a rigorous and principled account of the circumstances in which the transformative aspects of choice threaten the ability to choose rationally and authentically. One upshot is that, contra L. A. Paul, there is no special problem for making some "life-making" transformative choices rationally and authentically.

“Accuracy and Fairness” (w/ Rush Stewart and Yang Liu) 

This paper interrogates what sense of "fairness" is thought to be captured by the metric of "calibration" used in the literature on algorithmic bias.