Research

Many philosophers think of ethics as the study of how we ought to exercise our will, or what rules we should follow in our practical deliberation. My research concerns those many central parts of ethics that are left out of this conception -- in particular, the ethics of perception and of feeling. How ought we perceive each other? What is the moral dimension to our feelings? Perceptions and feelings are not voluntary, nor are they the conclusions of practical deliberation, and yet they reflect our character, and are morally evaluable in many of the same ways that we are. My research attempts to understand the moral evaluation of perception and feeling, among other things, and their relationship to our moral character. I am especially interested in how these evaluations are affected by the context of oppression.

Perceiving through the racial veil:
the inner moral life of racism

When I was a kid, before every school year, I’d go clothes shopping with my mom. And every year, I’d try to get her to buy me a beanie, but she always refused. Eventually, she explained why: she was worried about my safety. I was a young, brown, Mexican-American boy living in southern California. Kids who looked like me and wore beanies were viewed as what some may call today a bad hombre. She was afraid of white kids at school making fun of me, of teachers singling me out as a problematic student, and, most of all, of police perceiving me as a gang member when I got older, and reacting to me accordingly. She wanted people to see me for me, not for being a young, brown, Mexican-American kid and everything that was wrapped up in that image.

This dissertation is about what my mom wanted to protect me from: racist perception. What is it for a perception to be racist? (The topic of my paper, "The Racial Veil".) In what ways can we be responsible for our own perceptions or feelings when they are so shaped? (The topic of my paper, "Perceptual Responsibility and Racist Perception".) Finally, I am interested in how we can reorient our perceptions. (The topic of my paper, "Piercing the Racial Veil".)

The Inner Moral Life: Loving attention and Orientation

It is commonly recognized that our actions are morally evaluable. What is less commonly recognized is that our perception can be morally evaluable as well. A person may, for instance, perceive another through the lens of their own cares, concerns, desires, or anxieties. Perceiving others in this way is a moral failing as much as it is a perceptual failing. Iris Murdoch argued that perception of others requires what she called "loving attention". But what could such attention be? In this chapter, I distinguish between two forms of attention in order to understand how we can become better perceivers and not merely better doers. The first is first-order attention, what is often most associated with Murdoch’s loving attention, it is that virtue of perception when one attends to another on their own terms, as opposed to through the lens of one’s own cares, concerns, desires, or anxieties. The second is a kind of second-order attention, which I am calling orientation: the way one’s perception is oriented toward values, virtues, and The Good. Loving attention involves how we perceive others in a way that is morally proper, while orientation involves those virtues we work toward in bettering ourselves. First-order loving attention, then, should be an object of our second-order orientation. This way of reading Murdoch is less concerned with getting the right interpretation of Murdoch, and much more focused on understanding how her insight about loving attention plays a role in our ethical thought today.

The Racial Veil

On June 16th, 2015, Donald Trump announced that he would be running for President of the United States. In his announcement, he made the following statement: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best… They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with [them]. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Trump’s statements immediately garnered media attention, with many asking for him to apologize for what they took to be racist remarks. To most, these remarks are clearly racist. Engaging with Trump supporters over whether these statements were facts would be to already lose the argument and, I believe, miss the racist element.

There are many ways these remarks are racist, but one of the key ways is how Trump expresses and thereby reinforces a perception of Mexican, and other Latin American, immigrants. This point is not a statistical one about the likelihood that they are criminals. Trump reinforces being a drug dealer, a criminal, or a rapist as the dominant way of perceiving these immigrants—while still allowing for exceptions in case one ever happens to meet a “good” immigrant. But what does it mean to have racist perception—to perceive through the racial veil?

My aim in this paper is to understand the moral non-knowings of white ignorance, using the insight about the moral inner life from Iris Murdoch that I developed in the previous chapter. I will argue that there is a racial veil that functions in much the same way as the self-preoccupied veil Murdoch believes inhibits our moral perception. In understanding the moral inner life of racism, I believe we can make progress in understanding the moral dimensions of interpersonal racism. Much of the chapter will be spent doing two things. First, articulating the various details of the racial veil, specifically how stereotypes and misvaluing impedes our moral perception. Second, I will argue that this form or perception is morally problematic due to the way it draws one’s attention to race in a way that reinforces racial oppression.

Perceptual Responsibility & Racist Perception

Accounts of moral responsibility often emphasize the importance of one having control over their actions. For someone to be responsible for some action it must be a result of some decision-making process involving choice, desire, and/or self-disclosure. While we can adjust and alter our perception, perception is not the direct result of our choices and desires—it is not something directly under our control.

The first aim of this paper is to further articulate and provide an answer to this puzzle: how can one be responsible for their perception since it seems to lie outside of one’s control? I will argue that while one may not be responsible for one’s perception in the traditional sense, one can take responsibility for one’s perception. This involves not only the actions of considering how we ought to alter our perception but also involves an affective ownership of that perception: we should feel shame or guilt about our misperception.

The second aim of this paper is to apply this way of understanding perceptual responsibility to perceiving through the racial veil. In what ways is one responsible for racist perception? Again, due to the lack of control, which is if anything more significant in the case of racist perception, how is one responsible for racist perception? Again, my answer is that one must take responsibility. The seriousness of taking responsibility in these cases, however, may be more significant and require more from us moving forward.

Piercing the Veil: Loving Attention, Playfulness, and Moral Imagination

It is widely believed that the best way to address racism is by overcoming our tendency to perceive and think of humans under racial categories. But such overcoming is neither feasible nor desirable. Racist socialization has affected our perception too deeply to allow for us to overcome it anytime in the foreseeable future. And our understanding and evaluation of one another ought to be sensitive to our position in an oppressive system of racism. There must, therefore, be a better way to address racism. In this paper, I give an account of this better way.

My account begins with a distinction between two concepts of race: one, a Dominant Conception, the other, a Resistant Conception. The Dominant Conception is the conception operative in a racist system. The Resistant Conception is the way people of color often conceive of their own selves as raced: as belonging to an historically oppressed social group that is capable of moving beyond the stereotypes, misvaluing, and affects that are placed upon them. As I argued in “The Racial Veil”, racist perception involves perceiving with the Dominant Conception, and in this paper I will argue that in order to perceive people on their own terms, we must cultivate and utilize the Resistant Conception instead. Since the Resistant Conception is built out of how people of color conceive of their own selves as raced, it is the terms by which race ought to play in our perception of them. Finally, I will argue that cultivating this Resistant Conception of race will require one to imagine what it’s like to be a person of color in a racist society.

Gender Affirmation and Loving Attention (accepted in Hypatia)

Gender affirmation is a regularly talked about topic in queer and trans communities. Whether its sharing things that give them gender affirmation or looking for said affirmation, it comes up regularly in person and online among trans people. A number of interactions can give one gender affirmation, a trans woman having a door held open for her, a trans man getting a head nod from another man, or a non-binary person having gender neutral language used for them.

While gender affirmation is a regularly discussed topic and practiced rule in queer communities, little work has been done in understanding the moral value of gender affirmation--with most philosophical attention being on the moral harms of misgendering. In the interest of determining how we can be better allies to trans people, I believe this topic is worth philosophical exploration. In determining what makes gender affirmation morally distinct, we can understand better what provides us with salient moral reasons for our behavior toward trans people. This will have implications for how we use gendered language and engage in gender-coded behaviors.

I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. I argue that loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their marginalization.

In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering.

Beautiful Arrogance

On September 1st, 2016, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a nationwide protest by taking a knee during the ceremonial pre-game performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” While he has come under fire for protesting in this manner, by the time the NFL season started later that month, eleven other players had joined him. Solidarity protests grew quickly across many different sports and leagues (both professional and amateur), yet many of the responses to Kaepernick’s initial act have been negative. Among the claims made against him, one in particular has stood out: Kaepernick is arrogant. Historically oppressed people are often called arrogant despite not showing signs of superiority. Why are such people often viewed as arrogant then? What does this tell us about arrogance as an (im)moral attitude? Could arrogance sometimes be good?

In this paper I examine the attitude of arrogance in contexts of oppression, attempting to do three things. The first is to give an account of the moral psychology of arrogance, where what's central to arrogance is an inattention to others through reflectively endorsed self-preoccupied perception. The second is to utilize this account of arrogance to illuminate why people of historically oppressed groups are often called arrogant, even when they are not acting in a way that reflects the attitude of arrogance. Toward that end I present three possible explanations, two attend to the reasons why the viewers may believe these people are arrogant and one aims to understand the consequences of this practice, concluding that this practice reflects and reinforces the undervaluing of oppressed peoples. Third, I argue that in some cases where oppressed people are arrogant it is not necessarily bad. Instead, such arrogance serves as a form of resistance to oppression which gives it political value, which in turn has a kind of aesthetic value that inspires and motivates others to resist oppression as well. I call this kind of arrogance beautiful arrogance, which is not a vice but all things considered good.