Research
Personal Narrative, Meaning in Life and Memoir
Most of us regularly tell stories about ourselves to ourselves and others. My current research aims to explore this distinctive human habit from a set of fresh angles.
1. Narrative and Meaning
Within moral philosophy, I'm interested in the idea that the meaningfulness of a life relates in some way to the stories that can be told about that life. This "narrativist" approach to meaning in life can be developed in two broad directions. Relationists claim that a life gains in meaning when a particular set of “narrative relations” obtain between the events that constitute it. Recountists claim that it is the telling of a story about those relations, not the relations themselves, that confers meaning. My paper "Narrative and Meaning in Life" (Journal of Moral Philosophy) identifies problems with existing versions of both of these positions, then introduces what I take to be a new and more satisfying variant of Recountism, centered on the old-fashioned idea that a meaningful life is, in part, an intelligible one. I argue that personal narration does play a role in a meaningful life and that my account provides the best explanation of how and why that's so.
Within philosophy of literature, I'm interested in a set of neglected issues concerning the literary face of self-life narration: memoir, in the form of books and personal essays. Memoir has barely been discussed by philosophers of literature, which is both surprising and a shame, because it raises many interesting philosophical questions--questions that don't get deep coverage in literary studies either.
One philosophical question about memoir concerns what it is, exactly, and what distinguishes it from other forms of literature. A natural way of contrasting memoir and personal essays with novels and short stories is to claim that the former are nonfiction and the latter are fiction. But that turns out to be a controversial suggestion. Some argue that, because there’s no such thing as a unified and stable self to write about, or because memory is highly fallible, or because all narratives are constructions, all memoir is really just another branch of fiction. Are they right? Moreover, what’s at stake in answering this question? Why does it matter how we class things in the literary realm?
A further question concerns the role of truth in memoir. If memoir is different from fiction, that’ll be because it succeeds at making true rather than false claims about the self and the world. But what kind of truth are we talking about here and why should a memoirist aim for it? Goethe wrote: “Truth belongs to all written accounts of one’s life, either in relation to matters of fact or in relation to the feeling of the autobiographer, and God willing in relation to both.” That’s an admission that the literal truth and what’s sometimes called the “emotional truth” may sometimes diverge. When they do, which should memoirists go with? A further question relates to the possibility that Goethe ignores: it’s open to memoirists to fudge both the facts and their feelings. So why shouldn’t they? What’s the source of this alleged truth-telling obligation we place on memoirists, anyway?
Another set of questions center on memoirists’ ethical obligations not to their readers but to their subjects. It’s almost impossible to write memoir without including sensitive personal material about one’s family, friends, lovers, colleagues or acquaintances. This raises the possibility of wrongfully injuring others by writing about them. We might also wonder whether memoirists have responsibilities to themselves not to write about certain subjects, or about certain subjects in certain ways. What are the ethical constraints on what writers do in these areas, and how should they be balanced against writers’ other more literary aims?
Finally, there’s the classic, all-purpose philosophical question: why even bother? Writing a good memoir is difficult, exhausting and time-consuming, and in many ways still a misunderstood and disrespected endeavor. Why would anyone do it? Or, to put it more philosophically, are there any good reasons for doing it—as William Gass asks “any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner’s head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety?”
My book Artful Truths (University of Chicago Press, 2021) aims to provide an engaging, concise and comprehensive discussion of these questions for writers, teachers, students and readers of memoir, alongside philosophers of literature. The project was supported by an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, held at Stanford in 2019-20.
You can check out interviews about the book on Stanford's Philosophy Talk radio show here and the New Books Network podcast here. And here's my reading list if you're thinking of writing a memoir yourself.
Global Distributive Justice
My work in political philosophy falls into three related projects, all of which concern the distribution of benefits and burdens across the members of distinct nations. Here's a summary of how it all fits together. You can find copies of each of the papers listed here.
1. Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice
Philosophers who apply norms of justice to international politics have for the past several decades fallen into two broad camps. “Society-of-states” theorists argue that principles of global justice exclusively regulate the relationships between states (or between the “peoples” or “nations” roughly contained within state borders). “Cosmopolitans” argue instead that duties of global justice hold between each and every one of the world’s individuals. These positions can both be interpreted as deriving from a “statist” construal of the nature of world politics. Society-of-states theorists present global politics on the traditional model of interacting states; cosmopolitans, neo-traditionally, effectively treat the world as one very big state for the purposes of justice (to echo Socrates, each of us is a “citizen of the world”). Both pictures of the structure of international relations contrast with a third one, according to which global politics involves a variety of distinct forms of relationship, between a variety of distinct types of agent, occurring across some borders and not others, and characterized by quite different aims and forms. Not only is this third “pluralistic” picture descriptively more accurate, but it suggests a novel and attractive normative approach. On this approach, while some principles of global justice might apply at the level of the globe as a whole, others (likely most) will not, applying instead within forms of cross-border political, social or economic organization of a more limited or local variety. We would have disaggregated justice for a disaggregated world.
Several philosophers of global justice have recently advanced theories that exhibit this broadly pluralistic character (in different ways), but many aspects of the pluralistic approach remain under-theorized and it continues to face challenges from the more traditional competing theories. Much of my research in political philosophy has centered on exploring, developing and defending a pluralistic approach to global justice in response to these gaps and challenges.
The first paper in this project, “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice” (Journal of Political Philosophy), makes a preliminary general case for pluralism. The paper begins by distinguishing several candidate forms of pluralism in the domain of distributive justice. I next show how each of these forms is well supported, although for different reasons, within three widely endorsed approaches to distributive justice in general. I then vindicate the claim that current philosophical writing on global distributive justice in particular, by proponents of these three approaches among others, is at most weakly pluralistic in nature. I argue that this anti-pluralistic strain is both surprising in light of the theoretical consensus highlighted earlier, and counter-intuitive on its own terms. I finish by offering a set of debunking explanations for the force that anti-pluralism about global distributive justice exerts upon us, despite its apparently weak rationale.
One of the forms of pluralism that I distinguish within “The Many, not the Few” is “site-pluralism”: the claim that principles of distributive justice apply to more than one type of social, political or economic sphere. Two subsequent papers address the question of which specific spheres would count as sites of distributive justice, if site-pluralism were true. “Disaggregating Global Justice” (Social Theory and Practice) argues against the popular (non-pluralistic) proposal that principles of global distributive justice apply to “the global basic structure”. I argue, first, that this proposal fails to satisfy an important "action guidance" desideratum and, second, that this problem points to the superiority of the site-pluralistic alternative. A further paper, “Justice in Transnational Governance” (Journal of Applied Philosophy), begins to develop a more positive account of the specific types of sites to which principles of distributive justice apply. The paper starts by noting that the small portion of philosophical work on global distributive justice that directly discusses particular agents, institutions or practices in global politics tends to focus on a narrow range of the existing set. The emphasis is chiefly on bilateral diplomacy or intergovernmental organizations, to the neglect of a variety of more recent forms of transnational governance, many of which incorporate non-state actors, have more limited membership, involve informal and dynamic structures, employ cooperative and reflexive methods for ensuring compliance, and operate largely out of the public eye. I argue that we cannot rule out the possibility that the most promising philosophical theories currently available prohibit the extension of the concept of distributive justice to these neglected sites of transnational governance, that such an extension is appropriate in at least some cases, and that we therefore require a new or revised account of the ground of justice to accommodate them.
This last suggestion leads into a fourth paper, “How Association Matters for Distributive Justice” (The Journal of Moral Philosophy). A second form of pluralism that I distinguish in “The Many, not the Few” is “ground-pluralism”: the claim that several distinct types of features (of individuals or groups) are sufficient to generate duties of distributive justice. Current accounts of the ground of justice in the philosophical literature fall into two main camps, neither of which tends to be pluralistic in this sense. Associativists argue that principles of comparative distributive justice apply only among persons who share some form of association; humanists argue that some such principles apply among all human persons qua human persons. According to the "weak associativist" account that I defend in this paper, humanism is incorrect, but so are current versions of associativism. Association is necessary if talk of comparative distributive justice is to be apt, but no special form of it is required. Whether or not principles of comparative distributive justice do in fact apply to an association will depend on whether or not the conditions for legitimate enforcement of the resulting duties are satisfied, and we can expect these conditions to be satisfied by a wide range of associative forms. If this account succeeds, it both prepares the way for a robust form of ground-pluralism (many different forms of association will be capable of generating duties of distributive justice) and for a robust form of site-pluralism (if the forms of association at issue are widely represented in the world).
2. Welfare Consequentialism and Global Justice
A second project (the subject of my dissertation) is the development of a welfare consequentialist account of global distributive justice. Although welfare consequentialists have written on the duties of individuals to assist suffering foreigners, they have not developed detailed accounts of how norms of international justice apply to ongoing collective schemes of production and distribution, of the kind generally associated with the concept of distributive justice. My dissertation aimed to provide a general theoretical framework for approaching that question and then apply the framework to certain specific issues of transnational justice. This project is connected to the first project described above, since (as I argue in “The Many, not the Few”) there are good welfare consequentialist reasons to be a pluralist about global justice, but it also stands alone.
The project resulted in two published papers. One, “What’s Special About the State?” (Utilitas) considers the nature of the state's relationship to distributive justice from the perspective of utilitarianism, a theory that is barely represented in contemporary philosophical debates on this question. My strategy is to mount a utilitarian case for state- specific duties of distributive justice that is similar in its basic structure to the one that is standardly mounted for special duties towards the near and dear. I begin with a discussion of whether or not the citizenship relationship can be justified in terms of its welfare consequences. I then consider what the answer to this first question implies concerning the duties of distributive justice that arise within that relationship.
A second paper, “The Cooperation Argument for Fairness in International Trade” (The Journal of Social Philosophy) discusses how welfare consequentialists should approach the question of justice in trade. Many people believe that the current system of international trade not only adversely affects the basic welfare of the global poor, but is also unfair, in the sense that its benefits are arbitrarily skewed in favor of developed countries.The intuitive force of such complaints appears to pose a problem for welfare consequentialists. Not only do claims of fairness have no intrinsic significance within standard versions of welfare consequentialism, but fairness can conflict with the pursuit of goals that do have clear welfare consequentialist warrant. Some have suggested that a connection between fairness and socially beneficial cooperation provides a way for welfare consequentialists to incorporate concerns of distributive fairness in international trade into their theory. This paper outlines that argument and considers the challenges that it faces.
3. Justice in International Trade
My research focus moved away from an explicitly welfare consequentialist approach in later years (while remaining broadly consistent with such an approach). As part of this shift, I began to work on questions of justice in trade independently of their relationship to welfare consequentialism. One paper, “Risse on Justice in Trade” (Ethics and International Affairs), discusses the normative account of trade that Mathias Risse offers in his recent book On Global Justice. Like the broader theory of global justice of which it is a part, Risse’s position on justice in trade is an attempt to stake out a middle ground between those who (in Risse’s view) fail to recognize the full normative significance of contemporary international relationships and those who over-reach in that department, grounding highly demanding moral requirements in social structures that cannot bear the weight. I sympathize with the aim and Risse and I agree on our assessments of the extremes along this spectrum. However, I argue that Risse’s argument for his position on justice in international trade does not succeed in ruling out positions that likewise skirt the extremes, but are better able to capture the full scope of legitimate concerns about trade justice than is Risse’s more minimalist account.
Another paper, “Local Food: The Moral Case” (in Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson and Tyler Doggett (eds.). Food, Ethics and Society, Oxford 2016) addresses the question of whether or not affluent consumers in developed countries should preferentially purchase food produced within a relatively small distance from their current location or instead purchase food produced in foreign countries. I assess "locavore" arguments based on environmental preservation, human health, community support, agrarian values and political concerns, along with the criticisms that have been made of those arguments. I show that arguments on both sides of the debate are often inadequately specified and that the conclusions of those arguments are often overstated. The paper therefore makes a plea for a more philosophically nuanced assessment of the case for and against eating locally.
A further paper, "Justice and International Trade" (Philosophy Compass), identifies the main issues of justice that arise in international trade and critically evaluates contemporary philosophical debates over how to understand them. I focus on three central questions of distributive justice, as applied to trade. What is it about trade that makes it a subject of justice? Which aspects of the international trading system should our principles of justice regulate? What do duties of justice or fairness in trade demand? I show how debates over these questions turn not only on empirical disagreements specific to trade but also on deeper and more general disputes in moral and political philosophy. In connection with the broader research program described above, I argue that trade is a domain in which diverse moral concerns complexly intersect and that a satisfying account of it must do justice to this complexity by itself exhibiting substantial pluralism.
A final paper, "Exploitation in International Trade," was written for a conference in honor of Josh Cohen and was published in Ideas That Matter (Oxford University Press, 2019). It is only in the past few years that philosophers of global justice have given direct and sustained attention to the subject of international trade. An important line of division in this small but growing body of work lies between accounts of justice in trade that focus on the idea of exploitation and accounts that do not. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this debate, in order to get clearer on the nature and role of exploitation in the morality of international trade. I argue that, although concerns of exploitation are well founded and urgent in this domain, any account of justice in trade that centers on those concerns will be problematic. Our duties in relation to the international trading regime are better framed in terms of broader and deeper injustices that are not, fundamentally, a matter of unfair advantage-taking. I concentrate my critical comments on the work of Matthias Risse, Gabriel Wollner and Richard Miller on trade and draw, in my constructive comments, on Joshua Cohen’s work on global justice and in political philosophy more generally.