Associate Professor of Philosophy
Ph.D. Harvard, 2000
My research sits at the intersection of many different subfields: ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and the lively discussion of moral responsibility and free will. My recent work has focused on the agency we exercise over our own attitudes. In hopes of completing the present project, I expect, in the near-term future, to be doing work in philosophy of mind and action. My interest in our agency over our own minds grew out of my interest in the source and nature of the motives worth having, their justification, and our responsibility for them; I expect to return to these broadly ethical questions before long.
CV (pdf: updated 6/2/08)
Research Overview (pdf: updated 10/17/06)
Publications
Where possible, the links below take you to an on-line journal. Feel free to contact me if you have trouble accessing them.
I argue that making a certain assumption allows us to conceptualize more clearly our agency over our minds. The assumption is this: certain attitudes (most uncontroversially, belief and intention) embody their subject’s answer to some question or set of questions. I first explain the assumption and then show that, given the assumption, we should expect to exercise agency over this class of attitudes in (at least) two distinct ways: either by answering for ourselves the question they embody or by acting upon them in ways designed to affect them according to our purposes—in roughly the way we exercise agency over most ordinary objects. The two forms of agency are rarely distinguished, because the first does not display the most familiar and prominent features of agency, while the second seems to require an exercise of the first, at two distinct points. Nonetheless, many complex exercises of agency over our minds are easily seen—I think best seen—as composed of these two, more simple, forms.
"The Reasons of Trust," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 2 (June 2008): 213–236.
Trust is required for any collective enterprise; a psychologically healthy person must be capable of trusting others; trusting relationships are a vital component of a fulfilling life. Trust may also be recommended as a way to build greater trust in a particular relationship, a way to build the self-esteem of the one trusted, or as a way to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It may be required by one's role as friend, teacher, or parent. Trust is, in each of these ways, useful, valuable, important, or required. Yet I argue that, although each of these considerations genuinely counts in favor of trusting—and so, in some way, succeeds as a reason for trust—they cannot be taken up as one's reasons for trusting someone to do something. To whatever degree these are one's reasons for doing what one does, to that degree one is not trusting.
"Responsibility for Believing," Synthese 161, no. 3 (April 2008): 357–373.
To some it seems that rejecting doxastic voluntarism (rejecting the claim that we can believe at will) calls into question our responsibility for our beliefs. The underlying assumption seems to be that we are responsible only for what is voluntary. Thus, if we cannot believe voluntarily, we cannot be responsible for our beliefs. Yet it also seems clear that we are responsible for our beliefs. But any tension here is only apparent. The underlying assumption, that we can be responsible only for what is voluntary, is false. It holds in some central cases—and thus acquires its plausibility—but it does not hold generally. In fact, on at least one plausible account of what it is for a thing to be voluntary and what it is to be responsible for something, beliefs are not voluntary and yet, in failing to be voluntary, they are a paradigmatic example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. This paper sketches such an account.
"Sher's Defense of Blame," Philosophical Studies 137, no. 1 (January 2008): 19–30.
(This is a comment prepared for an Author Meets Critic session at the Pacific Division APA meeting in April 2007).
In his In Praise of Blame, George Sher aims to provide an analysis of blame that will itself yield a defense by allowing him to argue that morality and blame “stand or fall together.” He thus opposes anyone who recommends jettisoning blame while preserving (the rest of) morality. In this comment, I examine Sher’s defense of blame. Though I am much in sympathy with Sher’s strategy of defending blame by providing an analysis that shows its connection to our commitment to morality, I question his execution of this strategy. Sher hopes to defend our blaming practices by showing our dispositions to them to be a merely contingent consequence of a belief-desire pair that is itself justified by whatever justifies our commitment to morality. I doubt our blaming practices can be defended in this way. In explaining my doubts, I provide a short comparison of Sher’s approach with that of P. F. Strawson in “Freedom of Resentment.” I suggest that we might do better by exploring the connection between our commitment to morality and our blaming practices themselves.
"Rational Capacity as a Condition on Blame," Philosophical Books 48, no. 2 (April 2007): 109–123.
In "Rational Capacities" Michael Smith outlines the sense of capacity he believes to be required before blame is appropriate. I question whether this sense of capacity is required. In so doing, I consider different ways in which blame might be conditioned.
"Controlling Attitudes," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87, no. 1 (March 2006): 45–74.
I argue that, although belief is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, believing at will is impossible; one cannot believe in the way one ordinarily acts. Further, the same is true of intention: although intention is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, the features of belief that render believing less than voluntary are present for intention, as well. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that you can no more intend at will than believe at will.
"The Wrong Kind of Reason," The Journal of Philosophy 102, no. 9 (September 2005): 437–57.
Many philosophers currently writing about reasons identify a reason as a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude. This account generates a recalcitrant ambiguity; it fails to distinguish between two quite different sets of considerations that count in favor of certain attitudes, only one of which are the "proper" or "appropriate" kind of reason for them. The ambiguity has been the topic of recent discussion, under the head "the wrong kind of reasons problem." If we instead identify a reason as a consideration that bears on a question, we can distinguish "kinds" of reasons by distinguishing between kinds of questions on which a consideration can bear. Further, we can distinguish the "right" kind of reasons for certain attitudes from the "wrong" kind by considering the relation between the question on which the consideration bears and the attitudes of which it counts in favor
"The Force and Fairness of Blame," Philosophical Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2004): 115–48.Its sometimes thought that the special force of blame—that which distinguishes blame from mere description or grading—places extra justificatory burdens on blaming. Unlike describing or grading, blaming is unfair unless certain conditions are met (unless, e.g., the wrongdoer could have done otherwise or is able to control her behavior by the light of moral reasons). I argue that this thought is confused. Much of blame's force is found in a set of judgments—most centrally, the judgment that someone showed disregard for others. But once we grant that those judgments are true, their characteristic force cannot render them unfair.
I first pose a challenge which, it seems to me, any philosophical account of forgiveness must meet: the account must be articulate and it must allow for forgiveness that is uncompromising. I then examine an account of forgiveness which appears to meet this challenge. Upon closer examination we discover that this account actually fails to meet the challenge—but it fails in very instructive ways. The account takes two missteps which seem to be taken by almost everyone discussing forgiveness. At the end, I sketch an alternative account of forgiveness, one that I think meets the challenge and avoids the missteps.
Works in Progress
Mental Agency (pdf —draft— updated 8/21/06)
What sort of agency do we exercise with respect to our own psychology? To address this question, I adopt a perhaps peculiar but not unprecedented methodology: I assume that some theoretical grip on agency is afforded us by reflections on responsibility. Employing this methodology, I begin with an investigation of our responsibility for and agency over both our intentional actions and external states of affairs. This investigation yields an account of responsibility and agency that extends quite naturally to certain of our attitudes. The account implies that these attitudes, which are typically thought of as states, events, dispositions, or functions, are at least equally well thought of (in persons) as embodying our answers to certain questions, and so, I will argue, as embodying a fundamental exercise of our agency.
The Will as Reason (pdf, updated 8/5/06)
I here defend an account of the will as practical reason—or, using Kant's phrase, as "reason in its practical employment"—as against a view of the will as a capacity for choice, in addition to reason, by which we execute practical judgments in action. Certain commonplaces show distance between judgment and action and thus seem to reveal the need for a capacity, in addition to reason, by which we execute judgment in action. However, another ordinary fact pushes in the other direction: the activities of the will are activities for which the person is answerable in a very particular sort of way. This answerability is most easily understood if willing involves settling a question. Settling a question seems to be a capacity of reason. Thus it can seem that activities of will are activities of our capacity for reasoning. I will suggest that we can accommodate the commonplaces while still understanding the will as reason in its practical employment, by abandoning the assumption that practical reasoning concludes in a judgment. Rather, reasoning which concludes in a judgment—reasoning directed at the question of whether p—is theoretical reasoning. In its practical employment, reason is directed at the question of whether to x; it concludes, not in a judgment about x-ing, but rather in an intention to x.
Reasons for Action (pdf —draft— updated 11/4/05)
Donald Davidson opens his seminal "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" with the following question: "What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?" His answer to this question (or what is typically taken to be his answer) has generated some confusion and made for some difficulty in understanding the role of the agent's reasons in the explanation of action. I hope to dispel some of the confusion and to offer a very modest, formal answer to Davidson's question. I will propose an account of the form the explanation of action should take, when we care to preserve the proper role of the agent's own reasons for acting.
Extrinsic Reasons, Alienation, and Moral Philosophy (pdf —draft— updated 7/6/05)
In the last few decades virtue ethics has become a staple in introductory ethics courses, taking its place alongside consequentialism and deontology. These three comprise the default syllabus. Recent interest in virtue ethics is due, in no small part, to a spate of criticisms directed against the perceived alternatives, utilitarianism and Kantianism. In this paper I hope, not to revisit these familiar debates, but rather to point out a familiar but overlooked fact about action, a fact with implications that can be understood to unify and underwrite many of the criticisms against modern moral philosophy. The overlooked fact, once appreciated, does indeed tell against a particular approach to moral philosophy.
Attempting Virtue (in progress)
Abstract: This paper displays the role of each form of control in our attempts at moral self-improvement. It examines the way in which trying to believe can be self-defeating, and shows that the attempt to perform a virtuous action or adopt a virtuous attitude will be self-defeating in just the same sense.
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