Research

Current projects

I am working on three papers broadly connected to protest and accountability.

The first develops a full-fledged moral theory of protest that aims to hold others accountable. I first isolate the sense of "holding others accountable" in which it makes most sense to speak of political protest. This sense conceives of holding others accountable as a particular kind of communicative action that may or may not be driven by reactive attitudes. I then draw on the metaethics of fittingness to argue for a set of conditions under which holding others accountable in this way is fitting. These conditions are: that the protest is responsive to a wrong; that it has an appropriate shape, including proportionality and being of the right kind; and that it is done in good faith. From there, I argue that these conditions offer a robust framework for morally evaluating challenging real-life cases of protest.

The second examines blame that works by habituating its recipients into accepting reasons for action. Suppose, for instance, that someone blames you for telling an offensive joke at a party, and while you at first respond defensively, you come to agree with them over time as a cumulative result of being blamed many times in similar ways. I argue that this kind of blame, habituating blame, is both widespread and poorly understood. Moreover, focusing on it reveals a philosophical puzzle: many claim that blame improves the recipient's responsiveness to moral reasons, but habituating blame seems to work by giving people reasons that are orthogonal to the moral reasons the blamer aims for them to take up. I offer an account of how habituating blame might work. On this account, habituating blame makes its recipient better-positioned to see their moral reasons for action and prompts them to reconsider their past deliberations, creating a deliberative pathway from acting for the wrong reasons to acting for the right ones. I argue that this account solves the puzzle, while complicating other influential views of blame in the literature.

The third is about arrogance and illegal protest. A common criticism of political disobedients—those who protest illegally out of a commitment to moral principle—is that they act in a way that is intolerably arrogant. This criticism is often framed as a matter of epistemic arrogance: political disobedients think they know better than anyone else what the law ought to be. Theorists of disobedient protest have been dismissive of the objection because it is easy to demonstrate that political disobedients need have no such belief about the superiority of their judgment. But I argue that this is much too quick. The strongest version of the objection charges disobedients not with epistemic arrogance, but with moral arrogance: political disobedients make exceptions of themselves, manifesting a form of democratic disrespect. I then offer a rebuttal based on the value of integrity. I argue that arrogance is defined by a self-esteem motive, a desire to inflate one’s sense of worth. But people who act with integrity simply act on those convictions which are most deeply their own, and need not be driven by any self-regarding motives. The objection from arrogance overcomplicates its motivational explanation of protest because it asks one question too many in search of an unnecessary additional motive. As I then show, this argument extends to those who, like Thoreau, disobey out of a sense of complicity in collective injustice. And I show how the value of integrity grounds a right to disobey.

I am also in the early stages of developing a paper on the metaethics of moral change. The paper starts from the observation that accounts of moral change are subject to two kinds of theoretical pressures: a pressure to accommodate our everyday moral thought and language, and a pressure to accommodate the documented history of moral change. Authors in the literature respond to these pressures in different ways. Realist views of moral change presuppose a metaethics that readily accommodates our everyday moral thought and language, but that may have strange historical implications. Pragmatist views of moral change, on the other hand, often start from richly detailed historical accounts of moral change, but then presuppose a metaethics that has strange implications for our everyday moral thought and language. I argue that we can resolve these tensions by adopting a realist view that acknowledges the possibility of change in what is morally true, or what I call deep moral change.

Future work

My future research further develops the explanatory and normative aspects of the deep moral change project.

Someone who acknowledged the possibility of deep moral change might reasonably ask for an explanation of how change in moral truth comes about. I plan to offer such an explanation by building on an underdiscussed development in the literature. As Thomas Nagel and Joseph Raz recently argue, change in our moral concepts can change what is morally true. The starting premise for this argument is that, for there to be a moral truth, it must be accessible, at least in principle: a moral truth could not exist that nobody could conceive. But our ability to conceive of moral truths depends on our ability to grasp the relevant concepts. Take the moral right to free speech. Our ability to conceive of this right depends on our grasp of the concept of free speech. If we have such a right, then that is a moral truth that requires a grasp of the concept of free speech to conceive. And concepts like free speech are the result of historical development: people in 800 BCE did not have a grasp of our concept of free speech. It follows that, with new moral concepts, new moral truths can come into existence. I plan to argue that these developments are more likely to occur in certain areas of morality, those related to politics and technology, than others. And I will connect this argument to philosophical treatments of social movements that examine their role in developing new moral concepts. If deep moral change comes about through conceptual innovation, and social movements are sites of conceptual innovation, then social movements may play a role in fundamentally reshaping the moral landscape.

But what might deep moral change mean for us, practically speaking? Could it be a good thing? Suppose that deep moral change occurs and that what is morally true at time t₂ is different from what was morally true at t₁. Is it possible that at t₂ we are morally better-off (or, for that matter, worse-off) than at t₁? It might seem not, since, by hypothesis, what is morally true at t₂ is different from what is morally true at t₁. We seem to lack a common standard that would allow for comparative judgments between t₂ and t₁. Nevertheless, it also seems intuitive that for some t₂’s, we would be better off than at t₁. Deep moral change that results in the moral right to free speech, for example, seems like a change for the better, other things equal. Are such intuitions just a kind of chauvinism that insists on what is true now against what might, at another time, be true? I will argue that they are not. In my view, we can make sense of deep moral change being for the better by acknowledging, first, that morality does not exhaust the domain of value, and second, that the content of morality may not be fully determinate. Thus, deep moral change may be for the better when it newly determines the content of morality in ways that better serve the pluralistic domain of value. In turn, that gives us reason to welcome and encourage social movements that drive in this direction.

Dissertation abstract

The language of accountability is now a familiar feature of protest. Those who have recently attended a protest have likely heard organizers naming responsible parties and leading the simple, common chant: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” This dissertation offers a theory designed to explain what it might mean for protest to be a form of holding others accountable. To this end, the dissertation focuses on the concept of reproof. To reprove someone is to subject them to symbolic, burdensome treatment which communicates a condemnation of past conduct and a demand for reform in future conduct. The dissertation argues that confrontational, obstructive, even violent aspects of protest can sometimes be understood as a political manifestation of the burdensome treatment involved in reproof. By interpreting protest in this way, the theory sheds light on what many protestors are up to, how their actions represent a unique way of engaging in democratic politics, and how their actions might be justified.