Articulates a secular understanding of agape (love for all) and explores the possibility of an ethic of love that takes agape as its foundation; surprisingly, such a view turns out to be an ethic of respect.
Full Abstract
One of the central questions facing human beings is how we should respond to the humanity of others. Secular Western ethics has gravitated towards two kinds of answer: we should care for others’ well-being, or we should respect them as autonomous agents. Largely neglected is an answer we can find the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. Analytic philosophers have started to pay more attention to love. But unlike those working within religious traditions, for whom an ideal of love for all serves as the central, organizing ideal in ethics, most of these philosophers see love as confined to the domain of intimate relationships between friends, family, romantic partners and the like. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all, of agape, can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. Against challenges to the idea that love for all is possible, I offer a novel account of what it would be to love all. I go on to argue that while it is possible to love all, most of us should not, as doing so would rule out the possibility of loving particular friends and families. Instead, we should approximate love for all. I argue that the minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect, deriving the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-welfarism and anti-aggregation) from my account of love for all. (NB: this paper has been cited by its previous title "Ethics in the Shadow of Love")
Defends the appropriateness of irreducibly non-summative aesthetic judgments, like "this is a beautiful, troubling novel," and shows how this opens new possibilities in the debate about the aesthetic upshot of ethical features of artwork.
Full Abstract
Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has accepted a false presupposition: that if the answer is yes (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork's overall aesthetic value, i.e., as merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., "the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically prurient perspective on its female lead.'' Such a "non-summative" judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like "it's a 6/10" or "it's a pretty good movie!" I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people's character.
Argues that norms of truth telling should be understood in terms of the particular relationships we stand in with others.
Full Abstract
When and why we should tell the truth? Philosophers have traditionally answered this question with an exclusive focus on lying and deception, i.e., dishonesty. But where dishonesty involves withholding the truth, indiscretion is sharing or eliciting a truth that should be left unsaid. I argue that these vices and their correlative virtues must be theorized together as they constitute two halves of an answer to our question. Philosophers have traditionally explained our obligations to be honest in virtue of our status as agents or communicators in the abstract, treating relationships as exceptions to a general rule. I argue, however, that a unified account of honesty and discretion must start with the concrete relationships that a speaker is in with her interlocutors. Our relationships set the boundaries of what information is and is not “in bounds.” These communicative norms are constitutive of our relationships—that my friend can ask about my private life where my colleague cannot is part of what makes it the intimate friendship that it is. I argue that our reasons to tell the truth are explained by the relationships we are in: we have reason to follow their communicative norms just insofar as we have reason to be in the relationship. We moreover have reasons to share or withhold the truth in order to shape our relationships; relationships and their constitutive norms just are a product of our behavior, so by telling or withholding the truth, we can put certain topics in or out of bounds, molding our relationships into something new. We should make our relationships better ones—ones that make determinate otherwise indeterminate moral ideals of trust and autonomy.
Argues that living well is in part a matter of locating one's place in intergenerational relationships and achieving a kind of balance across generations—when we shouldn't pay back a gift, we should pay it forward.
Full abstract
My teachers gave me more than I was owed; I cannot pay them back, but I can and should pay it forward to my students. This paper asks why: why would receiving an undeserved benefit from one party generate normative pressure to do likewise for a third party? This question can't be answered by appeal to beneficence, gratitude, or fairness, and so we must look elsewhere. In bipolar relationships, like friendships, we are subject to a norm of balance; when another is especially generous towards me, I should relate in kind. Balance is essentially diachronic: healthy bipolar relationships sustain and thrive on local imbalances—but persistently one-sided relationships are thereby flawed. I argue that so, too, are we subject to a norm of balance across generations. When we cannot repay a gift back to achieve balance within a bipolar relationship, we can instead pay that gift forward to achieve balance across multi-generational relationships—like that connecting my teachers, me, and my students. And one can, it turns out, achieve inter-generational balance with recipients quite different from one's initial giver. The upshot: among the tasks of responding to deep asymmetries in our lives is achieving balance in multi-generational relationships.
“I love you,” “Don't worry about it”: A Theory of Non-Deontic Normative Powers (draft here)
Argues for the existence of non-deontic powers akin to promise and consent that do not operate by creating or waiving rights but instead by shifting non-deontic interpersonal norms.
Full abstract
Normative powers are often assumed or defined to be abilities to change requirements by one's say so. Promise and command generate duties (and so requirement); consent waives them. I argue that alongside such deontic powers, we enjoy a suite of non-deontic powers: abilities to shape non-requiring interpersonal norms by our say so. Suppose that we are meeting and we explicitly agreed to talk for an hour, but I see that the day is really getting away from you; it would be helpful to you to end early. My keeping you is permissible but still interpersonally defective—it's rude, imposing, graceless, etc. You can change that by your say so; you could, for instance, tell me "don't worry about it!" Your say so is not deontic consent as it did not change what was permissible; but it did make a normative difference, rendering my carrying on no longer graceless or rude. I defend a set of three atomic non-deontic powers that I call "allowance," "assurance," and "pressure" (analogues of consent, promise, and command). Molecular powers, most importantly the power exercised in telling another "I love you," are built out of atomic ones. The upshot is a novel theory of ubiquitous, understudied normative phenomena and a picture on which the deontic and non-deontic dimensions of interpersonal life are continuous.
Argues that political and interpersonal forgiveness are the exercise of a normative power: the waiving of entitlements to hold a past wrong against a wrongdoer; such a view explains the role of forgiveness in a life better than sentimentalist alternatives.
Full abstract
What is forgiveness? And why forgive? I mean this in two ways: what reasons bear on the question of whether to offer or withhold forgiveness in a particular case? and why are we even in the business of forgiving at all—what role does it play in a life? The dominant approach to the topic is sentimentalist, seeing forgiveness as essentially involving the withdrawal of a fitting sentiment like resentment or (moral) anger. I argue against this approach. Taking the phenomenon of political forgiveness—widely thought to be distinct from interpersonal forgiveness—as a point of departure, I argue that forgiveness it the waiving of the entitlements one has to hold a past wrongdoing against a wrongdoer. Forgiveness is a kind of normative tool, in the same family as normative tools like consent and promising; its function is the shaping of relationships, personal, social and political, by dropping past wrongs as a basis for ongoing relations. I argue for this view over sentimentalism on the grounds that in both political and interpersonal cases of forgiveness it better: captures the diverse array of occasions for forgiveness, explains the capacity to forgive conditionally and partially, makes sense of our reasons to forgive and not to forgive, and situates forgiveness within a broader conception of our moral lives.
Love, Partiality and History, forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Personal Relationships (draft here)
Defends a view of the rationality of love, and so of partiality, that turns on a diachronic requirement of constancy.
Full abstract
A theory of partiality must answer two questions: what motivates (virtuous) partiality and what justifies it. Suppose my friend Kevin is sick and I change my plans to volunteer at a soup kitchen in order to bring him soup instead. It seems obvious that I am justified in being partial to him because we are friends—our special relationship permits (and sometimes requires) partiality. Yet when I act out of love for him, I am not motivated by the fact that we are friends, but instead by non-relational facts, e.g., that Kevin is sick. Where the relationship seems like a necessary normative reason it seems not to be a motivating reason; this introduces a tension to a theory of partiality, with normative and motivational explananda pulling in opposite directions. The solution to this tension lies in recognizing the (largely ignored) diachronic nature of partiality. To act of out love is not to be moved by the fact of one’s relationship; it is to have a history of so relating to someone. And it is in virtue of that history that non-relational facts (e.g., that Kevin needs help) have greater rational weight. I defend a (defeasible) rational requirement to be constant with respect to the way we relate to others. Having shown that it offers a unified account of the ethics and moral psychology of partiality, I argue this requirement can be generalized to other cases of reasoning in the face of parity. (NB: A previous version of this essay was called "The Importance of Being Constant")
On Giving Permission (very rough handout available on request)
Argues that validity conditions of consent are relationship-sensitive; constitutive of a given relationship are its norms of permission-giving.
Full abstract
When does consent successfully waive a right, i.e., generate a permission? The standard answer is when it is informed, voluntary and competently given. But that is less an answer than a restatement of the question: how much information is needed? how voluntary the tokening of consent? how competent the agent? Extending the relationships-based framework of my dissertation, I argue that an adequate conception of consent must recognize that the relationships we inhabit fundamentally structure the rights we bear to others in two respects: first, many of our rights are waived not by explicit consent but exactly by entering into special relationships with others—part of what it is to be a friend, teacher or partner is to have waived certain rights and thereby allowed for a kind of interaction that would otherwise be permissible. Second, our relationships set the terms by which further rights are waived are themselves set by the relationships we inhabit—the requisite levels of information, voluntariness and competence are all a function of the ends of our relationships. Of course, many relationships set unacceptable terms of consent: the history of medical research and of domestic providing obvious examples. I argue that our relationships successfully waive rights and provide the normative standards for consent only insofar as they are determinate realizations of an indeterminate ideal of autonomy. In the absence of good relationships, consent may be impossible—or rather possible only after a healthy relationship is established. This framework helps us at once make sense of the variety of cases of morally transformative consent and of the central importance of legal and social norms around consent, e.g., campus policies around sexual consent or hospital policies around research and treatment.
Engages with Darwall's fantastic The Heart and Its Attitudes, but argues it suffers from an objectionable dualism that sees respect and love (attitudes of the will and the heart) as two utterly distinct phenomena when they are in fact deeply connected.
Review of Saito's, The Aesthetics of Care, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (published version; prepub draft)
Argues first and foremost that you should read this (really wonderful) book, and offers (very sympathetic) criticism of Saito's striking claims about the ethics of repair, the distinction (Saito resists) between people and things, and the possibility of objects manifesting ethical virtues (she says they can; I agree but think objects' virtues are not the same as humans').
Review of Goodin's, Consent Matters, forthcoming in Criminal Law and Philosophy (prepub draft)
Praises the books many merits and argues its distinctive, tort-like approach is powerful but objectionably narrow in its understanding of consent's social role.
Explores ways Valentini might (or might not) extend her powerful account of social norms to non-deontic social norms; argues that her view of respect is really of mere toleration.
The papers below are all "on the back burner." But don't hesitate to write if you want to chat about any of these!)
Privacy, Politics, and Big tech
When pressed on Google’s surveillance of customer data, CEO replied, “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” His response reflects a common view: that privacy matters just when (and because) the particular information at issue is embarrassing or could be used in some way to undermine our interests. But as the 2016 US election made abundantly clear, the question of who has what access to what information is also a question about power. Drawing on the framework developed in “Honesty and Discretion” I argue that questions of consumer privacy should be reframed: instead of asking what rights consumer have over their data, we should instead ask how candidate regulatory regimes around data and information would structure the relationships between citizens, corporations, political candidates and the state. Engaging with a growing literature in sociology and legal academia, I argue that the central concern in debates about “privacy” is less a matter of individual consumer’s rights and more a matter of social relationships. Google, Facebook, Apple and others’ anonymizing and aggregating data before it is sold is not a solution to the real problem. I argue that the informational norms that would best serve democratic ends and facilitate healthy relations of power between citizens, companies and political entities are far more restrictive than most public policy proposals currently consider.
On Deceiving (Prospective) Research Subjects
Some research in the social sciences depends on deceiving the subjects of an experiment in order to gather good data. When and why is this permissible? I put the view developed in “Honesty and Discretion” to work and argue against Shiffrin and others that when the ends of the relationship between researchers and subjects requires it, lying is often not wrong in such cases, nor even is there a pro-tanto reason not to lie in light of whose violation some recompense is owed. What is wrong, however, is the way in which researchers often obscure those motives in order to obtain consent to enter into the researcher-subject relationship in the first place. I will argue that researchers must be more upfront with potential subjects about the nature of the prospective relationship, and drawing on the literature on clinical trials , I argue that doing so can be consistent with the need for researchers not to undermine the integrity of the study by focusing patients' attention on the possibility of imminent deception.
Algorithmic fairness is a political question
When is an algorithm fair? ProPublica’s much-cited reporting has raised that question about COMPAS—an algorithm used to predict recidivism for pre-trial detention hearings. Though on some measures (viz. “calibration”), the algorithm treats white and Black defendants the same, other measures (viz., false positive rates) reveal worrying racial disparities. A nascent literature in philosophy and computer science has asked what measure should be used to quantify the fairness of an algorithm. I argue that the literature is off on the wrong foot. Fairness is not a property of algorithms considered in and of themselves but only as a tool within the criminal justice system. What metric is used to judge the fairness of an algorithm is not an a priori question; false positive rates might be a poor measure of fairness in some contexts but an important one in others, in particular in environments which suffer from a crisis of racially disparate mass incarceration. There is no single privileged measure of fairness; competing metrics should be understood as representing distinct (and sometimes equally legitimate) political ends. The right metric of fairness should be seen as a political question, to be decided on democratically. To see algorithmic fairness this way is to reframe the debate: instead of arguing for one measure of fairness over another, we should equip citizens with the tools to decide which ends to prioritize or compromise in setting pre-trial detention.
Arbitrariness: A charge against Metaethical Non-Naturalism
This paper is concerned with explanation and normativity. It argues for a familiar thesis—reductionism about the normative—on familiar grounds: there is something about non-reductive views that leaves them unable to explain the connection between the normative and the non-normative. In its most familiar form, this style of argument focuses on supervenience, and claims that non-reductive views are unable to explain the modal connection between the normative on the non-normative. But instead of focusing on supervenience, I argue that we should redirect our focus on the connection between the normative and the non-normative more generally, of which modality is just one aspect. The deeper point to notice about the connection between the normative and the non-normative isn't modal so much as explanatory. In short, I claim that that the connection between the normative and the non-normative is not an arbitrary connection; it is an intelligible one. It is the sort of connection for which there must be a ground, a reason why it obtains. Non-reductionist views, of a kind typified by Parfit, Scanlon, and Enoch, as well as more exotic views like Rosen’s that reject supervenience, all make the connection between the normative and the non-normative arbitrary, by refusing to countenance a ground for why the connection obtains. They should therefore be rejected. This project has two parts. FIrst, making precise this notion of arbitrariness and arguing that non-reductionist views fail to respect the non-arbitrary character of the connection between the normative and the non-normative will be the task of the first section of this paper. Second, advancing a solution to the problem of arbitrariness: an appeal to essences, i.e., to the natures of things. Only by showing that the connections between the normative and the non-normative are essential, i.e., follow from the natures of things, can the connections be shown to be non-arbitrary. I then consider many forms such an essentialist view could take, arguing that non-reductionist attempts at developing an essentialist metaphysics of normativity must be abandoned in favor of reductionism.
Clarke's Non-Dogmatic Rationalism
The argument against non-naturalism I make in the above paper resonates with the objection Samuel Clarke makes against Hobbes and other voluntarists. Clarke is often read as of a piece with other historical rationalists like Price and Balguy, and their descendants, including Ross, Nagel and Parfit. It is easy to see these thinkers as forming a natural group. When pressed to give an explanation of why morality has the content it does or why one should be moral, the response is a kind of principled dogmatism: moral truths are fundamental, and admit of no further explanation. Clark, however, is not dogmatic and should not be read as in fellowship with the others. Clarke’s famous objection to the voluntarism of Hobbes is that it leaves morality unexplained and arbitrary, i.e., that an appeal to a sovereign’s will—be it God’s or a king’s—cannot explain why the moral law is one way rather than another. Clarke, unlike many of his fellow rationalists, is therefore committed to their being some reason why the moral law is the way it is: it is in the nature of things that certain actions are “fit”. Fitness is a matter of multiple things (agents, their roles, their circumstances and actions) coming together just right, like a peg and a hole; fitness is explained solely in virtue of the natures of the relata (and not in virtue of something external to them like a command of God or a fundamental normative law). By distinguishing his essentialist metaphysics from his epistemological rationalism, I argue that we should read Clarke as offering an importantly different view from those with whom he is often grouped. Moreover, I suggest that his critique of voluntarism should be taken seriously as an objection not just against voluntarists but other rationalists and that his appeal to the natures of things is perhaps the only way to adequately meet his challenge.