Research

My main research interests are in ethics, broadly construed. My current work focuses on moral responsibility. I also have interests in moral psychology more broadly, as well as meta-ethics and normative ethics.

Degrees of Hypocrisy (under review): Here I argue that hypocrisy comes in degrees and that this underappreciated fact helps us understand hypocritical blame. Hypocritical blame is neither always appropriate nor always inappropriate. Hypocritical blame is pro tanto inapprorpiate to the degree that the blamer is insufficiently committed to the value they blame another for transgressing, that is, to the degree the blamer is hypocritical. The more hypocritical an instance of blame is, the more inaccurately it signals the blamer's commitments, making the blame pro tanto inappropriate.

Asymmetrical Tracing (under review): Responsibility theorists debate whether moral responsibility requires tracing. Paradigmatic cases of tracing involve drunk driving in which an agent, at the time of driving drunk, does not have the sort of control over their behavior typically required for responsibility, but intuitively the agent is responsible for driving drunk. Some argue that to account for the responsibility of agents in these sorts of cases we must trace back their responsibility to a time at which the agent had control over their action and the later action was reasonably foreseeable (in the drunk driving case, this could be starting to drink at the bar knowing one has no ride home). The debate about tracing has been between those who think we need tracing as part of a theory of responsibility and those who deny this claim. I argue that we do need tracing to account for certain instances of blameworthiness, but we do not need tracing to account for any instances of praiseworthiness.

The Right to Forgiveness (in progress): In this paper, I argue that wrongdoers sometimes have a right to be forgiven. Many in the literature think that forgiveness is elective (that it is never morally or rationally required) and almost everyone thinks that there can never be a right to forgiveness. I argue that this thought is mistaken. In particular, facts about the nature of the relationship between the prospective forgiver and forgiven can ground the latter's right to be forgiven. 

The Rationality of Rejecting Praise (in progress): Praise is typically thought of as a benefit to the praisee or something that the praisee takes pleasure in. However, there are cases in which we are wont to reject praise, even when we think that we are praiseworthy (and in fact are praiseworthy) for the action we are being praised for. What would make it rational to reject a benefit that one (correctly) believes one deserves? I argue that a perlocutionary effect of praising someone for some action is to lead those that witness the praising to believe that the praiser and praisee have achieved mutual moral understanding with respect to that action. Insofar as we sometimes have an interest in it being known that we are not morally aligned with the praiser, it can be rational to reject the praise.