These are papers in various stages of development. Please contact me if you’d like to cite them.
“A direct Kantian duty to animals” (July 2011)
ABSTRACT: Kant held that because non-human animals lack rational wills, they do not have the unconditioned value necessary to ground direct moral duties to them. Hence, according to Kant, our duties to animals are in fact indirect duties rooted in a direct duty to ourselves, that of moral self-perfection. Here I argue that Kantianism can make sense of a direct duty to promote animal welfare. Doing so requires rejecting three axiological dogmas shared by Kant and his followers: that every good is either unconditioned or conditioned with respect to what is unconditionally good; that only that which is unconditionally good can be an end-in-itself; and that whatever is an end-in-itself therefore has dignity and is beyond price. Animal welfare, I argue, is neither an unconditioned nor a conditioned good, but it is, by analogy with human happiness, a final and intrinsic good and hence an end-in-itself that lacks dignity. This imperfect and direct duty to promote animal welfare does not threaten Kantians’ core commitments concerning the unconditioned value or dignity of the rational will, but it does operate according to a consequentialist logic that is anathema to how Kantians understand the morality of interactions among human agents.
“Lies as epistemically reckless assertions” (December 2011)
ABSTRACT: I defend a philosophical account of the nature of lying according to which lies are epistemically reckless assertions. This account (ERA) claims that a person lies just in case she asserts a proposition she does not believe to be true and which, she believes, flouts the epistemic norms for warranted assertion operative in the context in which she makes her assertion. I identify five criteria that an adequate philosophical account of lying should meet and show that, in comparison to rival philosophical accounts of lying, ERA more elegantly and parsimoniously explains a broader set of facts about lying and better satisfies these five criteria.
“A Socratic criqitue of Socrates’ noble falsehood” [co-authored with Ara Astourian] (November 2011)
ABSTRACT: Most commentators have dismissed the Republic’s “noble falsehood” as unjust without noting that it is introduced after an explicit discussion of justified and unjustified deception. Hence, little attention has been given to whether this falsehood is justified on Socrates’ own terms. We outline Socrates’ contrast between two types of falsehood: useful falsehood and “true falsehood,” a contemptible state of the soul. The noble falsehood clearly belongs to a category of useful falsehood, namely lies told to prevent doing evil through ignorance. However, the noble falsehood can only meet Socrates’ aims if it also meets the criteria for a contemptible true falsehood. The noble falsehood thus turns out to be both contemptible and unjustified, while also being useful and justified. We consider two objections and suggest this tension concerning the noble falsehood is evidence that competing views of how true belief is related to its account vie for Plato’s allegiance in the Republic.
“The constitutive approach to Kantian rigorism” (January 2012)
ABSTRACT: Critics often charge that Kantian ethics is implausibly rigoristic: that Kantianism recognizes a set of perfect duties, encapsulated in rules such as ‘don’t lie,’ ‘keep one’s promises,’ etc., and that these rules apply without exception. Though a number of Kantians have plausibly argued that Kantianism can acknowledge exceptions to perfect duties, this acknowledgment alone does not indicate how and when such exceptions ought to be made. This article critiques a recent attempt to motivate how such exceptions are to be made, namely, the constitutive approach developed by Tamar Schapiro. I argue that the constitutive approach is vulnerable to the objection that it is too permissive, justifying many morally dubious exceptions to perfect duties. I conclude by briefly outlining an alternative ‘fine print’ approach to the rigorism objection that appears to avoid the objection leveled at Schapiro’s approach, focusing on how modifying the constituents of agents’ maxims can change the deontic status of an act of a generally impermissible kind.
“Consequentialism and our special relationship to self” (December 2011)
ABSTRACT: A common objection to consequentialism is that it cannot ascribe intrinsic moral significance to the special relationships we bear to our friends, family, loved ones, etc. However, little has been said about the prospect of a special moral relationship to self. Here I argue that such a relationship exists; that it has features distinguishing it from other putative special relationships, most notably, that it generates options rather than obligations; that making sense of such options requires positing that the self has a normative architecture wherein the self as agent and self as patient stand in an authority relation; and that consequentialism cannot make sense of such a normative architecture and so cannot make sense of the special relationship to self. Acknowledging a special relationship to self also modifies and strengthens the objection that consequentialism is too demanding on individual agents.
“Agents, patients, and obligatory self-benefit” (November 2011)
ABSTRACT: Consequentialism is often criticized for rendering morality too pervasive. One somewhat neglected manifestation of this pervasiveness is the obligatory self-benefit objection. According to this objection, act-consequentialism has the counterintuitive result that certain self-benefitting actions (e.g., investing one’s money for maximal expected return) turn out, ceteris paribus, to be morally obligatory rather than morally optional. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, I consider and reject four strategies with which consequentialists might answer the obligatory self-benefit objection. Despite the apparent consequentialist credentials of these answers, none of these strategies is adequate because each fails to justify agents failing to benefit themselves when benefiting themselves would be otherwise required by the imperative that overall good meet a certain threshold. Second, I argue that no plausible consequentialist response to this objection is forthcoming because consequentialism denies the central axiological fact propelling this objection, namely, that the self possesses a normative architecture relating the self as agent and self as patient. This architecture, I propose, justifies the option not to benefit oneself. KEYWORDS: consequentialism, self-interest, selfhood, moral agency
“The denial of moral dilemmas as a regulative ideal” (January 2012)
ABSTRACT: Recent philosophical debates about moral dilemmas have focused on whether there are genuine dilemmas, situations in which an individual is subject to clashing obligations that cannot both be fulfilled. Realists affirm the existence of such situations, whereas irrealists deny them.Here I defend an alternative approach to moral dilemmas according to which the denial of genuine moral dilemmas functions as a regulative ideal for moral deliberation and practice. On this view, moral inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that there are no genuine moral dilemmas, much in the fashion that Kant claimed scientific inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that our scientific knowledge can be unified. The regulative ideal view is not a metaphysical position concerning whether there are genuine moral dilemmas and is thus officially agnostic about the existence of such dilemmas. It is instead a methodological stance taken up in practical reasoning and deliberation. The regulative ideal view (I argue) is superior to both realism and irrealism in accounting for two central features of the phenomenology of moral dilemmas. First, it can explain the rationality of the self-reproach that agents often experience subsequent to acting within apparent moral dilemmas. Second, it explains an important asymmetry between our first-personal and third-personal standpoints on moral dilemmas. If I am correct, then my view permits us to retain many of our beliefs and attitudes concerning moral dilemmas without hitching them to any controversial metaphysical stance about whether genuine moral dilemmas are real or not.
Luck, blame, and blameworthiness (January 2012)
ABSTRACT: Scanlon has recently proposed an account of blame I call the ‘double attitude’ account. On this account, blame is the revision of attitudes that occurs when we judge that a person’s conduct manifests attitudes at odds with the normative expectations we have for that person in light of our specific relationship(s) with her. Scanlon claims that this account justifies blame being sensitive to outcome luck, such that individuals who harm others due to ‘bad luck’ are blamed more harshly than those whose ‘good luck’ results in no such harm, even though they are equally blameworthy. Here I argue that Scanlon’s claim is incorrect — that his double attitude account in fact implies that blame should be allocated equally to the lucky and unlucky alike. However, I leverage Scanlon’s contractualism to show how divergences in blaming behaviors can justifiably track outcome luck even though blame ought not.
