My research interests all concern moral learning and political transformation. I am motivated by the following question: how can we get others, and ourselves, to value overcoming injustice? That is, to more properly see and feel the appeal of living in a society of equals?
You can view my dissertation here.
Works in Progress
A paper on vindictive anger. Under Review. Email me for a draft.
“Feminism and Suspect Femininity” Email me for a draft.
In this paper, I ask how we should feel towards women who conform to suspect norms of appearance. Procedures that help women approximate the feminine ideal, such as invasive cosmetic surgeries or Botox are two such examples. I present a novel type of empathy, which I call proleptic empathy, which avoids treating women as either pitiful victims or as accomplices in their own oppression. Proleptic empathy is a technique for understanding, and feeling towards, those whose very identities can be said to be suspect, that nevertheless treats them with the epistemic humility that their situation calls for. It requires switching back and forth between two types of imaginings: on the one hand, simulating what it is like to be in the woman’s shoes on the assumption that her suspect behavior stems from her will. On the other, simulating what it is like to be in the woman’s shoes on the assumption that her suspect behavior stems from external cultural influences. This mode of empathizing respects those who conform to suspect norms because it presupposes, and thus signals, that their agency is structured by conditions outside of their control but also by themselves. In so doing, it opens up new possibilities for responsible agency, which itself serves liberatory aims.
“Transitional Moral Contexts” Email me to discuss.
There is a class of cases that trickled to foreground of the #MeToo movement which occupied the opposite end of the spectrum from the clearest cases of sexual violation, the latter exemplified by Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar and the like. These cases are ones in which something about the sexual interaction appears morally fraught, but where there is disagreement amongst members of the moral community over whether they ought to count as cases of ‘sexual assault’ or ‘rape’ on the one hand, or ‘grey rape’ or ‘bad sex,’ on the other. In this paper, I address how we should feel towards the men who figure into these types of cases. My suggestion is that the reason we have such difficulty adjudicating individuals’ responsibility in these cases is because these are instances of transitional moral contexts where what it is to act morally remains an open question. I defend that this has implications for our current practices of blaming and our online comportment in particular. I argue that online public shaming campaigns in response to these cases are morally and prudentially inappropriate. The reason for this is that practices of shaming provide those doing the shaming with a false sense of moral security. In shaming others, one feigns to be more ‘off the hook’ morally speaking, with respect to the problem at hand than they are entitled to be. It allows them to pretend that their own sexual practices are more egalitarian than they in fact are. Transitional contexts explain how the collective nature of these wrongdoings makes this so.
“Violence and Emancipatory Politics” Email me for a draft.
The goal of this paper is to explore the role that education and violence play in emancipation. By way of referring to Frederick Douglass’s biographical accounts, I hope to show that the two, education and violence, are more closely related than one might have antecedently thought. In particular, both education and violence can function as what I call modes of emancipation. By this, I mean that there are cases in which education and violence can serve similar functions; namely, the function of assisting particular individuals, in particular contexts, in their fight for freedom.