Research
My primary research interests are at the intersection of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy. I'm in the early stages of writing a dissertation with Susan Wolf on the interpersonal dimensions of racism using Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy and psychology. Below are abstracts of papers currently in progress.
Beautiful Arrogance (under review) |
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 arrogance is understood as believing oneself to be more important than others. 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 cases where oppressed people are arrogant it is not necessarily bad, but all things considered good due to its role in resisting oppression.
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Gender Affirmation and Loving Attention |
Whenever we talk about our friends, coworkers, or spouse, we likely use gendered language—most commonly, we use gendered pronouns. There is growing social agreement that it is morally wrong to misgender trans men as women, e.g. by using the pronoun 'she' to refer to a man, and vice versa. But what about genderqueer people who fall outside of the gender binary? A recent paper by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak argues that this same moral duty not to misgender trans men and trans women extends to genderqueer individuals who use pronouns like 'they'/'them' or 'ze'/'zim'. Furthermore, they argue that we have a further moral duty to use gender-neutral pronouns for everyone--in part because we only have a duty not to deny people's gender as opposed to needing to affirm people's gender. This paper questions this more radical conclusion by arguing that we regularly have good moral reasons to gender affirm trans people (both within and outside the binary). I believe these reasons come out of wanting to reflect the virtue Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Finally, given these considerations, I argue that the project of gender-neutralizing the English language is better understood as part of a pluralistic resistance to cissexist oppression and not a moral duty.
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Reclaiming Slurs |
Much has been said about the semantics and pragmatics of slurs. However, in many of these accounts there has been underwhelming explanations of an important part of slurs in our society: the fact that they are often reclaimed by their former targets. My contention is that to understand how slurs are reclaimed, one must first attend--not to the semantics of slurs--but how they oppress the marginalized. I provide an account of this where slurs reinforce what Sandra Bartky has called psychological oppression, which leads to a divided self or double-consciousness. I then go on to examine various aspects of how slurs have been reclaimed in the past to show that reclamation projects are aimed at undermining this oppressive effect by subverting the power of definition that privileged groups hold over words. It is through this subversion that one can reunify one's self, albeit partially.
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