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, employment, poverty, and public health. Public health researchers have long recognized that health outcomes depend not only on people’s biology but also on the social environments in which they grow up and live. The idea that there are what are called social determinants of health is by now well-established. But social and political philosophers have been slow on the uptake. The second part of my research agenda seeks to remedy this shortcoming by bringing out the implications of the social determinants of health for social and political philosophy.

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.

"The Obligation and Value of Justice in Hume" (forthcoming, 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. Properly understanding Hume’s accounts, I argue, requires revisionary understandings of his accounts of both the set of things susceptible to fundamental moral evaluation and his view of the nature of utility.

"Taylor Swift and the Revenge Fantasy" (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

"Moral Worth, Moral Motivation, and Hume's Circle Argument" (R&R)

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" (under review)

Economic change can bring many benefits, but it can also upset the economic positions and prospects of individuals and communities by dramatically curtailing access to decent employment. This paper explores the question of how a society ought to address those left behind by economic change. The paper's first goal is to defend the claim that the best way to frame the issue of access to decent employment is not just as an issue of economic policy but also as a public health issue, a framing that it justifies, in part, through the case study of deaths of despair, a phenomenon famously explored by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This framing clarifies the moral urgency of expanding access to decent employment. The paper's second goal is to discuss the values at stake in the problem and in the possible solutions.

"Justice and the Social Determinants of Agency" (with Edward Song)

In the last 30 years, there has been a revolution in our understanding of how neglect, trauma, and toxic stress profoundly influence neurological and psychological development. We have known for some time that a bad childhood correlates with poor health and deviant behavior later in life. But we now have a fairly deep understanding of the neurological mechanisms by which neglect, trauma, and toxic stress become biologically embedded in the body in ways that both undermine our health and compromise our capacity for responsible agency. As far as we can tell, the philosophical community has shown almost no sensitivity to the implications of this research, but it has profound philosophical significance. Agency is not something that just happens. It is the result of a developmental process, a process that can be disrupted in various ways as a result of social conditions. In short, just as there are social determinants of health, there are social determinants of agency. Noticing this point, we contend, should make us reconsider assumptions that many political philosophers have made about the connection between responsibility and justice. In particular, we defend the claims that 1) the central tenets of responsibility-sensitive theories of justice (such as libertarianism, desertism, and luck egalitarianism) can illuminate very little about the problems of poverty and inequality given the role that compromised agency plays in their persistence, and 2) despite what some of their defenders say, these theories are committed to the need for many traditional welfare state supports because they are crucial for the reliable development of agency, which these theories value deeply. But even going beyond these theories in particular, the research on neglect, trauma, and toxic stress should reframe philosophical discussion of what we owe to those in positions of social disadvantage.

"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.