Research
My work investigates the nature of cares and what it means to act in accordance with what we care about. It usually does this by bringing together research in the cognitive sciences and philosophical work on agency to construct a revised picture of ourselves as moral and free agents in light of what the science says.
Published Work
European Journal of Philosophy, 2023
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Much has been made about the ways that implicit biases and other apparently unreflective attitudes can affect our actions and judgments in ways that negatively affect our ability to do right. What has been discussed less is that these attitudes negatively affect our freedom. In this paper, I argue that implicit biases pose a problem for free will. My analysis focuses on the compatibilist notion of free will according to which acting freely consists in acting in accordance with our reflectively endorsed beliefs and desires. Though bias presents a problem for free action, I argue that there are steps agents can take to regain their freedom. One such strategy is for agents to cultivate better self-knowledge of the ways that their freedom depends on the relationship between their conscious and unconscious attitudes, and the way these work together to inform action and judgment. This knowledge can act as an important catalyst for agents to seek out and implement short- and long-term strategies for reducing the influence of bias, and I offer four proposals along these lines. The upshot is that though bias is a powerful influence on our actions, we need not resign ourselves to its negative effects for freedom.
Some Papers in Progress
"Animal Freedom"
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​Humans have freedom, do other animals? This paper argues that they do. Specifically, it advances an account of a kind of freedom which I term animal freedom. Animal freedom is constituted by an agent’s pursuit of the things that matter to them. My account depends on two central considerations. The first is that many things matter to us independently of whether we endorse or consider their importance for our values or projects, because they reflect who we are. The second is that many things matter to other animals in just this way—that is, in a manner that reflects who they are. Since other animals can act in pursuit of the things that matter to them, they have animal freedom. But animal freedom is not restricted to the psychological lives of other animals, nor is it something which is easily contrasted with the way that we think of ourselves as free, such that we can say that ours is the freedom of persons while theirs is the freedom of animals. Instead, much of our own waking lives is also made up of instances of animal freedom, and these events are ones which we would regard as genuinely constituting or realizing our free agency. There is therefore considerable overlap in the free lives of human and other animals. Recognizing this fact stands to enrich our conception of ourselves as free agents, as well as our understanding of the psychological lives of other animals and our obligations to them.
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"Psychological Freedom in Plato's Republic" (with Rachel Singpurwalla)
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We argue that in the Repubic, Plato stakes out a picture of psychological freedom according to which one is psychologically free so long as one is ruled by reason. Rule by reason and psychological freedom go together because only reason considers the interests of all parts of the self in decision making, and only reason is capable of securing the agreement of all parts of the self that a given course of action is best, with the result that when we are ruled by reason we act with our whole self. Our analysis presents the Platonic picture of freedom as one that emphasizes our status as beings whose psychologies are essentially divided, but who are free when the interests of all parts of our psychology are represented in our decisions. On this view, understanding freedom is not a function of understanding which part of our divided soul psychology speaks for the self, but rather understanding that freedom exists only when all parts of our psychology speak together in harmony. Our goal in this paper is to present evidence for this reading of Plato’s account of psychological freedom, and to develop his argument for why harmony is essential for being free agents.
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"Newly Acquired Values and Morally Worthy Actions"
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Many theories of morally worthy action appear promising when motivation is a black box. But such theories appear less plausible once we have a heavyweight theory of motivation. In this paper, I review a promising theory of value acquisition and motivation in the cognitive sciences known as valuationism, and argue its conclusions complicate the analysis of several cases of intuitively morally worthy action for right-reasons accounts of moral worth. Specifically, I argue that the conclusions of
valuationism imply that agents’ apparently morally worthy actions in these cases could not have been motivated by the non-instrumental reasons that justify them. I argue this
leads right-reasons theorists to a dilemma: either they bite the bullet and argue the actions in question are not morally worthy, a choice requiring a drastic reappraisal of the
moral world, or they abandon the idea that morally worthy action requires that action be motivated by the non-instrumental reasons that justify them. I argue that the latter choice is preferable, since it allows us to retain our plausible intuitions across many cases of apparently morally worthy action.
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"The Virtues and Vices of Contrarianism" (With Dan Moller)​
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We offer a theory of contrarians like Socrates, Martin Luther, and Thoreau, and explain how contrarianism can function as an epistemic virtue. On our view, contrarians don’t just dissent from orthodoxy, but from a specific ingroup, and in a specific domain. Contrarians must also have some independent perspective that animates their dissent rather than parroting others, and they must express their dissent publicly, which will often produce alienation or reprisals. Finally, contrarianism isn’t bloodless inquiry; contrarians are animated by contempt for conformism and herd-behavior. The virtues of contrarianism include the ability to disrupt epistemic bubbles and echo-chambers that have formed among our ingroup, and contributing an adversarial element to our social epistemology, familiar from the legal system. But our account also has the resources to explain how contrarianism can spill over into a vice, since it is a trait like kindness or skepticism that requires judicious application.
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