Research

My primary research interests are at the intersection of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy. I'm particularly interested in exploring dimensions of what Iris Murdoch called the inner moral life, as well as how living under oppression changes the moral evaluation of one's actions and moral attitudes. Below on the left I have an outline of my dissertation which is currently in progress. On the right side are some papers in progress.

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

Overview

My dissertation aims to answer questions about the moral psychology of racism and its interpersonal dimensions by learning from the insights of what Iris Murdoch called the inner moral life. On my view, systemic racism produces a veil that distorts our perception of the world in the same way Iris Murdoch believes our self-preoccupied anxieties creates a veil that distorts our perception. The veil not only distorts our perception of people of color, leading to morally problematic actions, but this misperception is a moral failing in itself, which can lead to a damaged character. This damaged character results from an internalization of racial superiority and requires a change in attention to overcome.

The Inner Moral Life: Loving attention and Orientation

I argue that Murdoch's insight about an inner moral life rests on understanding two interrelated senses of attention. On the one hand, you need to perceive a situation or person properly in order to come to know what to do. You need to look, as she puts it, with just and loving attention. On the other hand, she discusses reorienting our attention toward the good. In this chapter, I aim to understand the relationship between these two senses of attention—what I call loving attention on the one hand, and orientation on the other. Understanding this relationship, I take it, is the key to understanding Murdoch’s insight about the importance of the moral inner life. My project then, is not to do straightforward Murdoch exegesis—determining exactly what Murdoch meant—but to articulate how we ought to understand her insight and make it serviceable for my project of understanding interpersonal racism.

The Racial Veil

My aim in this chapter 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. The idea being that the racial veil discussed by W. E. B. Du Bois 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. I seek, then, to establish two points: that the metaphor of perceiving through a veil helps us understand the immediacy of implicit racial bias and that such perception is itself immoral, regardless of downstream actions. I being by discussing the value of using moral metaphors before arguing for my primary two points. I conclude with some thoughts about the role of intentions in racist behavior.

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.

Gender Affirmation and Loving Attention (under review)

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.

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.