Research
My work lies at the intersection of interpersonal normative ethics, social philosophy, and moral psychology. Normative ethics asks questions about what actions are right and wrong and what kinds of lives we should live. Social philosophy asks questions about the justice of social structures (both formal and informal). Both areas of philosophy require robust epistemological commitments. (How can we know that we have acted rightly? How do epistemic gaps in our understanding prevent us from adequately working to promote justice?) And, both require close attention to moral psychology. (What reactive attitudes are warranted in response to an action that another commits? What roles can emotions, beliefs, and attitudes play in helping to undermine or promote justice?)
In my dissertation I analyzed apology and forgiveness as practices of moral repair; the motivating question for that work was to explore not just what makes an action wrong, but what reparative obligations one bears after committing a wrong. As a non-ideal theorist concerned primarily with gender and racial justice, I aim to explore what obligations we bear in light of the legacies of historical and ongoing oppression.
I have published on the variety of harms that someone might experience in their capacity as a knower, including epistemic injustice, epistemic silencing, and what I call exclusionary harms. I have also explored moral emotions like love, contempt, and anger, as well as moral-emotional practices like empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation, all of which can be used to challenge injustice of various types. Unjust ideologies and cognitive biases heavily influence our perception of ourselves and others. That means that our inner lives – what we perceive, believe, and feel – are sites of resistance where individual actors can work to promote justice. Those conclusions impact not just how we ought to act as individual agents, but what kinds of social policies we should implement.
My scholarly commitments, then, are primarily to restorative/transformative justice (broadly construed), which operates both at the interpersonal level (in the form of individual agents’ reparative obligations) and at the social level (in the form of liberation from oppression). In short, I am concerned with how both individual agents and moral communities ought to perceive, think, and feel in a world shot through with injustice.
Not Giving Up on People: A Feminist Case for Prison Abolition
coauthored with Audrey Yap
Scheduled for publication with Rowman & Littlefield on December 15, 2023
In this book Audrey Yap and I engage theoretical arguments about personhood and moral repair into conversation with the work of activists and the experiences of incarcerated people to make the case that prisons ought to be abolished. We argue that contemporary carceral systems in the United States and Canada fail to treat people as genuine moral agents in ways that also fail victims and their larger communities. Such carceral systems are a form of what we call “institutionalized moral abandonment”. Instead, we argue that we should create communities of moral solidarity which open up space for wrongdoers to make up for their wrongs.
As part of this argument, we address one of the paradigm cases of wrongdoing often used to justify carceral systems: rape. Carceral systems that treat perpetrators of sexual violence as irredeemable monsters both obscure the reality of sexual violence and are harmful to everyone involved.
As an alternative to carceral systems, we argue for an orientation towards justice that is grounded in moral repair. This incorporates elements of restorative justice, mutual aid, and harm reduction. Instead of advocating for one specific and universal approach, we argue for multigenerational collective action that aims to build resilient communities that support the well-being of everyone.
Chapter 3 - Sexual Violence and Carceral Logic is open access and can be downloaded via the link.
Chapter 7 - Not Giving Up is open access and can be downloaded via the link.
Articles and Book Chapters
Only Human (In the Age of Social Media)
coauthored with Shannon Dea
Forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, edited by Hilkje C. Hänel and Johanna Müller, Routledge.
This chapter argues that for human, technological, and human-technological reasons, disagreement, critique, and counterspeech on social media fall squarely into the province of non-ideal theory. It concludes by suggesting a modest but challenging disposition that can help us when we are torn between opposing oppression and contributing to a flame war.
Inductive Reasoning Involving Social Kinds
coauthored with Tyler Hildebrand
Forthcoming in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association
Most social policies cannot be defended without making inductive inferences. For example, consider certain arguments for racial profiling and affirmative action, respectively. They begin with statistics about crime or socioeconomic indicators. Next, there is an inductive step in which the statistic is projected from the past to the future. Finally, there is a normative step in which a policy is proposed as a response in the service of some goal—for example, to reduce crime or to correct socioeconomic imbalances. In comparison to the normative step, the inductive step of a policy defense may seem trivial. We argue that this is not so. Satisfying the demands of the inductive step is difficult, and doing so has important but underappreciated implications for the normative step. In this paper, we provide an account of induction in social contexts and explore its implications for policy. Our account helps to explain which normative principles we ought to accept, and as a result it can explain why it is acceptable to make inferences involving race in some contexts (e.g., in defense of affirmative action) but not in others (e.g., in defense of racial profiling).
Weapon and Shield: Apologies and the Duty to be Vulnerable
coauthored with Katie Stockdale and Audrey Yap
Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 9 (3): 1-20 (2023)
Apologies are an important part of moral life and a method by which someone can satisfy their reparative obligations. At the same time, apologies can be used both as a shield to protect the person apologizing, as well as a weapon against the person to whom the apology is owed. In this paper we unpack both of these claims. We defend two principles one should employ to try to avoid such bad outcomes: (1) Apologies must be one-sided and non-transactional, and (2) the wrongdoer must be willing to pay what they owe. We argue that these principles require the wrongdoer’s emotional vulnerability. Furthermore, we argue that the duty to be vulnerable in issuing apologies helps to make sense of why apologizing well is so difficult, and why members of privileged groups might be especially prone to apologizing badly.
Betrayed Expectations: Misdirected Anger and the Preservation of Ideology
coauthored with Audrey Yap
Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 24 (3): (2023)
This paper explores a phenomenon that we call “justified-but-misdirected anger,” in which one’s anger is grounded in or born from a genuine wrong or injustice but is directed towards an inappropriate target. In particular, we argue that oppressive ideologies that maintain systems of gender, race, and class encourage such misdirection and are thereby self-perpetuating. We engage with two particular examples of such misdirection. The first includes poor white voters who embrace racist and xenophobic politics; they are justified in being angry about their own economic exploitation, but that anger is misdirected in a way that maintains capitalism (which is the appropriate target of their anger). The second includes so-called “incels” who embrace misogyny; they are justified in being angry about unrealistic and unhealthy standards of contemporary masculinity, but that anger is misdirected in a way that maintains patriarchy. One goal of exploring this type of justified-but-misdirected anger is to thread the needle between holding wrongdoers to account while also clearly identifying the oppressive ideologies that influence their actions.
Not Giving Up on Zuko: Relational Identity and the Stories We Tell
coauthored with Audrey Yap
Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy. Wisdom from Aang to Zuko, edited by Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt. Wiley-Blackwell.
Everyone thinks they know who Prince Zuko is and can be. His father, Fire Lord Ozai, and sister, Azula, think him weak, disobedient, and undeserving of the crown. His Uncle Iroh thinks him good, if troubled, but ultimately worthy of his faith. The kids initially think him a villain, but eventually come to see him as a person – neither monster nor saint – someone who can choose to go in a new way. Zuko himself shows great ambivalence between these conflicting stories about who he is, though each one helps to craft his own self-understanding. In this paper, we apply Hilde Lindemann’s narrative account of the self to explore the ways that others “hold” Zuko in one identity or “let him go” from others. According to Lindemann, our personal identities consist of the first- and third-person stories that cluster around significant acts, relationships, and commitments in our lives. Our identities are fundamentally relational, formed by the interaction between our own self-conception and the ways in which others see us. As such, others’ stories can enable or prevent us from imaginatively projecting ourselves into a particular future. This can lead us to becoming trapped in our identities; without the possibility of being perceived differently by others, we might find ourselves unable to try different ways of being or acting. The converse is also true, in that others can open up new possible identities by seeing things in us that we have trouble seeing in ourselves. If others in our moral community see us as wicked, beyond redemption and unable to repair our wrongs, we are held in the role of the villain and might come to live into that role without question. Zuko’s story is a perfect illustration of Jean Harvey’s reminder that, “it is just not true that once a thief, always a thief” and that agents can choose to go in a new way, can choose to change. How does Zuko change? We argue that Zuko’s redemption is enabled by those in his moral community holding him in identities in which he is a good person, capable and deserving of care, friendship, and love. While the identity he has in relation to his father and sister closes down many possible futures, his uncle Iroh in particular persists in holding him in an identity in which he is loved and worthy of love. And in doing so - in holding this space for him - Iroh opens up a way for Zuko to exercise agency and choose to become a different kind of person than the one he thought he was destined to be.
The Limits of the Rights to Free Thought and Expression
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 31 (2): 133-152. (2021)
It is often held that people have a moral right to believe and say whatever they want. For instance, one might claim that they have a right to believe racist things as long as they keep those thoughts to themselves. Or, one might claim that they have a right to pursue any philosophical question they want as long as they do so with a civil tone. In this paper I object to those claims and argue that no one has such unlimited moral rights. In Part 1 I explore the value of the freedoms of thought and expression. In Part 2 I argue against the unlimited moral right to free expression, focusing in particular on the special obligations and moral constraints that obtain for academics. In Part 3 I argue against the unlimited moral right to free thought.
Love, Activism, and Social Justice
Love, Justice, and Autonomy: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Rachel Fedock, Michael Kühler & T. Raja Rosenhagen. New York: Routledge. (2020)
This paper analyzes the relationship between love and social justice activism, focusing in particular on ways in which activists rely on either the union account of love (to argue that when one person is oppressed everyone is oppressed), the sentimentalist account of love (to argue that overcoming injustice is fundamentally about how we feel about one another), or love as fate (to argue that it is in love’s nature to triumph over hatred and injustice). All three accounts, while understandable and attractive, are seriously problematic, as they tend either to obscure important differences in the ways that various groups are socially situated or to enable inaction by trusting that justice is inevitable. Alternative, deeper interpretations of each account (and their relationships to activism) are explored.
Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism: Intersections and Innovations, edited by Jennifer Kling. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Rodopi. (2019)
I argue that silencing (the act of preventing someone from communicating, broadly construed) can be an act of both interpersonal and institutional violence. My argument has two main steps. First, I follow others in analyzing violence as violation of integrity and show that undermining someone’s capacities as a knower can be such a violation. Second, I argue that silencing someone can violate their epistemic capacities in that way. I conclude by exploring when silencing someone might be morally justifiable, even if doing so is an act of violence.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation
The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Kathryn J. Norlock. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield: 117-134 (2017)
Forgiveness has received considerably more attention in the Western philosophical literature than has reconciliation. That’s unfortunate, since both are important responses to wrongdoing and are central to moral life. In this paper I develop an account of interpersonal reconciliation. On my view reconciliation is fundamentally bilateral (whereas forgiveness is fundamentally unilateral). It entails transparency and agreement between the wrongdoer and the victim as to the nature of a past wrong or set of wrongs. And, it requires that moral repair be made between the two parties (which entails that both parties bear proper attitudes towards each other). In making my case I contrast reconciliation with toleration and collaboration, in order to demonstrate that reconciliation also entails forgiveness (though forgiveness definitely does not entail reconciliation).
Love and Resistance: Moral Solidarity in the Face of Perceptual Failure
Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2 (2): 1-21 (Fall 2016)
In this paper I explore how we ought to respond to the problematic inner lives of those that we love. I argue for an understanding of love that is radical, challenging, and that can be a powerful form of resistance within the confines of everyday relationships. Far from the platitudinous and saccharine, I will argue that love does not call for us only to celebrate our loved ones’ strengths and accomplishments, nor for us to accept our loved ones’ failings. Instead, part of what loving another requires is believing in their potential to grow, holding them to account when they fail, and expecting them to be better.
I argue that loving others means meeting them where they are and working to understand the role that oppressive ideologies, coupled with cognitive biases, play in generating and entrenching their problematic mental states. I then argue that we ought not disengage with our loved ones or write them off as lost causes, nor should we accept that we will simply “agree to disagree.” Instead, we should stand in moral solidarity with our loved ones and press them to become better while simultaneously understanding that such moral growth is usually a slow and painful process – often, the project of a lifetime.
Empathy and a Life of Moral Endeavor
Hypatia, 31 (1): 171-186 (2016)
Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey contributed many invaluable insights that help to make sense of both injustice and resistance. Specifically, she developed an account of what she called “civilized oppression,” which is pernicious in part because it can be difficult to perceive. One way that we ought to pursue what she calls a “life of moral endeavor” is by increasing our perceptual awareness of civilized oppression and ourselves as its agents.
In this paper I argue that one noxious form of civilized oppression is what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I then follow Harvey in arguing that one of the methods by which we should work to avoid perpetrating testimonial injustice is by empathizing with others. This is true for two reasons. The first is that in order to manifest what Fricker calls the virtue of testimonial justice, we must have a method by which we “correct” our prejudices or implicit biases, and empathy serves as such a corrective. The second is that there are cases where the virtue of testimonial justice wouldn’t in fact correct for testimonial injustice in the way that Fricker suggests, but that actively working to empathize would.
Perceptual Failure and a Life of Moral Endeavor
Social Philosophy Today, 31: 129-139 (2015)
Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey argued that as agents engaged in a “life of moral endeavor,” we should understand ourselves and others to be moral works in progress, always possessing the potential to grow beyond and become more than the sum of our past wrongs.
In this paper I follow Harvey and argue that in order to live a life of moral endeavor, it is not enough merely to know about injustice. Instead, we must engage in the difficult and often painful task of overcoming deep-seated cognitive biases that cause us to fail to perceive the ubiquitous injustice that pervades our world. I conclude by arguing that education, empathy, and love can each help us to increase our perceptual awareness of injustice and so should be recognized to be crucial parts of a life of moral endeavor.