Research

I have two main long-term research projects. The first is an attempt to revive a Humean approach to thinking about several questions in moral and political philosophy. I am developing (what I take to be) Hume’s idea that morality is best understood as a social achievement, an approach that begins with our innate social capacities but then shows how they get extended by the recognition that we face problems or miss out on opportunities when we can’t or don’t cooperate in larger groups. Using this approach, we can explain and justify the way we live together in a large-scale, complex social world. At the same time, this approach is able to give us the distance we need from our actual social practices to criticize them and to direct our efforts to reforming them.

My second long-term research project, which is relatively new, is an attempt to make progress on practical policy questions about labor and employment. My particular interest is in the phenomenon that the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called deaths of despair. Deaths of despair are deaths resulting from drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease, and suicide, and parts of the United States (particularly the Midwest and Appalachia) are facing an epidemic of them. These deaths are at least partially caused by the loss of good employment opportunities (usually in manufacturing and mining) in these areas. I am working on developing the idea that thinking about access to employment as a public health issue (rather than only a question of economic policy) changes the moral urgency of addressing it.

Here are brief abstracts for some of my current papers:

Publications

"Hume's Account of the Scope of Justice" (published in Hume Studies)

Hume’s account of the scope of justice, many think, is implausibly narrow, applying almost exclusively to respect for property rights. Such a view would indeed be highly objectionable because it would leave out of the scope of justice altogether requirements to keep our promises, obey the law, and refrain from threats and violence (among many others). I argue that Hume's theory of justice, properly understood, avoids this objection. And seeing how is instructive because once we understand his account correctly, we can appreciate its resources for offering attractive explanations of why a number of diverse phenomena fall within the scope of justice. Overcoming this challenge is a major stepping stone on the way to seeing Hume’s theory of justice as a genuine competitor with the other major theories of justice in the philosophical literature.

"Hume's Justice and the Problem of the Missing Motive" (published in Ergo)

The task that Hume explicitly sets himself in 3.2 of the Treatise is to identify the motive that renders just actions virtuous and constitutes justice as a virtue. But surprisingly, he never provides a clear account of what this motive is. This is the problem of the missing motive. The goal of this paper is to explain this problem and offer a novel solution. To set up my solution, I analyze a recent proposal from Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and illustrate what it gets right and what it gets wrong. I develop a solution that retains the benefits of his proposal while addressing its defects. The result is a significant advancement in our understanding of Hume’s theory of justice.

"Taylor Swift and the Revenge Fantasy" (provisionally forthcoming in The Philosophy of Taylor Swift: Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin, Editors: Lindsay Brainard, Ryan Davis, and Jessica Flanigan, Oxford University Press)

Taylor Swift often engages with the themes of resentment and revenge in her music and lyrics. In fact, at least one song on each of her studio albums deals with these themes. This paper focuses on a particular genre within these themes, namely, the revenge fantasy. The bulk of this paper focuses on an issue that comes up with “no body, no crime” (which features HAIM). This song dramatizes a particular kind of revenge fantasy, namely, a violent revenge fantasy. Taylor’s character in the song kills the husband of one of her friends, Este, after he apparently murders Este for accusing him of cheating. My interest is one of moral psychology. On the one hand, extrajudicial, vigilante killing is morally wrong. We rightly disapprove of such behavior. But on the other hand, we approve of enjoying indulging in fantasies about such morally objectionable behavior. If you doubt that, I ask you to listen to “no body, no crime” and think about which character(s) you are rooting for. I’m interested in this tension in our moral psychology. Why would we disapprove of the behavior but approve of fantasies about engaging in the behavior? That’s the question that this paper explores. I defend an account of these attitudes that shows not just why they are consistent, but why they are exactly the attitudes we should have.

In Progress or Under Review

"The Obligation and Value of Justice in Hume" (R&R, Hume Studies)

This paper develops an interpretation of Hume’s accounts of the obligation and value of justice. According to my interpretation, Hume takes the obligation of justice to depend (in part) on the conventions that define the rules of justice realizing a distinctive form of value, which I call functional value. Along the way, I argue for a revisionary view of what Hume thinks the objects of moral evaluation are and highlight its significance for properly understanding Hume’s theory of justice.

"Moral Worth, Moral Motivation, and Hume's Circle Argument" (under review)

There is a robust philosophical literature on virtuous motivation. Is the virtuous person motivated to do what's right, read de dicto or de re? Philosophers take different views on this question. But this literature has, surprisingly, failed to engage with an argument in Hume (what has come to be known as the circle argument), which bears directly on this question. On my reading, Hume takes the distinctive position that while de dicto moral motivation might be constitutive of a particular virtue (what we might call the virtue of "dutifulness"), it cannot be the motive of the virtuous person in toto. Instead, possession of any other virtue (e.g., justice, beneficence, etc.) requires that a virtuous person be motivated by those things of value with which the virtue in question is concerned.

"Work and Public Health"

In the last several years, philosophers have turned their attention to long-neglected ethical and political questions about work. One strand of this literature concerns the place of work in a good life. What kinds of goods come with access to employment? There are obviously financial benefits, but there are also non-financial benefits such as access to social networks, respect from one’s community, and correspondent self-respect. But almost no one has framed access to work for what I think it is: a public health issue. To defend this view, I bring to bear work in economics by Anne Case and Angus Deaton on what they call deaths of despair. Deaths of despair are deaths resulting from drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease, and suicide. The US is in the midst of an epidemic of deaths of despair, and one major driver is lack of access to decent employment (or, perhaps better, loss of access to decent employment). Without decent employment opportunities, people not only have less money but also much more difficult access to social networks and a loss of a sense of self-respect. All of these things precipitate declines in mental health and ultimately deaths of despair. Access to employment (often somewhat misleadingly tracked with the unemployment rate) is usually conceptualized as an economic policy issue. And it is, of course. But most economic policy issues don’t so directly, and so devastatingly, impact health outcomes. Access to employment should also be conceptualized as a public health issue. How, if at all, does this change in how we conceptualize the issue affect our policy response? The main thing that conceptualizing access to employment as a public health issue does is focus our attention on the fact that lack of access to employment is not just a misfortune. Rather, it is a threat to health and safety. Governments in liberal societies don’t have an obligation to do something about any and every misfortune that citizens face. But governments in liberal societies do have an obligation, to the extent that they can, to shield their citizens from threats to health and safety. If this is right, then governments have an obligation, to the extent possible, to ensure that their citizens are protected against that threat, by having access to decent employment opportunities. I leave open exactly how governments should go about doing this, since it is a challenging political and economic question.

"Consent, Promising, and Publicity"

Many philosophers working on the ethics of consent accept the Intentions Thesis, according to which the content and extent of what we consent to is fixed by our intentions. This paper raises a number of objections to the Intentions Thesis and diagnoses the error upon which the thesis relies, namely, that it renders consent unable to account for a publicity requirement, according to which what fixes the content and extent of what we consent to must be something public. I defend the publicity requirement on consent by means of an analogy with promising. Having objected to those accounts of consent that rely on the Intentions Thesis, I end the paper by sketching an account of consent that can accommodate the publicity requirement.

"A Humean Account of Political Obligation"

This paper develops a Humean account of political obligation, i.e., the moral obligation to obey the law of one's state. For Hume, political obligation is an instance of what we might call obligation by convention. When an active social convention meets certain moral standards, it generates an obligation to abide by its demands, at least among participants. I develop an account of what these moral standards are, and I argue that the vast majority of people count as participants in the legal conventions of their states. Thus, at least as long as their state's legal conventions meet the relevant standards, citizens have a moral obligation to obey the law.

"Mill's Euthyphro Dilemma"

This paper argues that Mill's famous test for distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures--the "competent judges" test--can be interpreted in either of two ways, each corresponding to one side of a Euthyphro dilemma. In particular, do the competent judges prefer the higher pleasures because they are higher or are the higher pleasures higher because the competent judges prefer them? According to several prominent interpretations, Mill opts for the first option, but I argue on the basis of textual evidence that Mill is committed to the second. I go on to argue that this interpretation helps to explain several other seemingly mysterious features of Mill's theory of value. My conclusion is that Mill's theory of value is both consistent and insightful, though I take no stand here on whether it is ultimately successful.

"Three More Against Justice: Thrasymachus, Rousseau, and Marx"

This paper defends the claim that three figures in the history of philosophy--Thrasymachus, Rousseau, and Marx--each have fundamentally the same critique of the demands of justice, namely, that they are foisted upon the powerless for the benefit of the powerful. The goal of this paper is to bring out and subject to critical analysis this overlooked tradition of philosophical thought about the nature of justice.