Research

My research lies primarily at the intersection of ethics, moral psychology, and social philosophy, but draws heavily from recent work in applied philosophy of language and social ontology. I am interested in how we understand ourselves and the world around us, and how these understandings shape both how we do act and how we should act. Currently, my interests are (literally) self-centered. I focus on questions concerning self-conception: which beliefs, emotions, values, etc., are truly part of an agent's understanding of herself? How is this understanding shaped? How does her understanding of herself impact how she acts and how we might evaluate her actions?

Articles

For any papers without uploaded drafts, please feel free to email me.

Under Review

The Gravity of Self-Directed Duties

The existence and coherence of self-directed duties (i.e., duties one owes to oneself) has been the topic of much debate lately. However, beyond defending their existence, not much work has been done to compare self-directed duties to their other-directed counterparts. In this paper, I examine three ways that self-directed duties might be thought to differ from self-directed duties: compensatory obligations, liability to defensive force, and respective weightiness. For each of these, I will provide some reasons to think an asymmetry between self-directed and other-directed duties is initially appealing. Contrary to appearances, I will then show why the asymmetry is not so obvious. In doing so, I will identify what one would need to show in order to demonstrate that there is a genuine asymmetry between self-directed duties and their other-directed counterparts, and argue that such a standard has not yet been met. I conclude that self-directed duties are not so obviously different, and carry many of the same consequences as their other-directed counterparts.

Mental Illness Terms and Hermeneutic Hijacking

In this paper, I introduce what I call ‘hermeneutic hijacking’. Hermeneutic hijacking occurs when a nonliteral usage of a term eclipses the term’s literal meaning, preventing the original term from functioning as it should. I argue that this allows us to explain the distinctive harm of using mental illness terms nonliterally.

In Progress

Diagnosing Diagnosis

An earlier draft of this paper was co-authored with Ethan Higginbotham (UC Davis).

Receiving a diagnosis, especially for a chronic or particularly serious illness, can feel life changing. But diagnosis can also feel inconsequential in a way. It is not as if receiving a diagnosis is what makes one sick, after all. In this paper, I provide an analysis of what ‘diagnosis’ as a speech act does. I do so by first considering an intuitive picture of diagnosis, what I call the Fact-Finding Account. On this account, diagnosis is an informative practice; a successful diagnosis accurately identifies a true fact about the world. Despite its intuitive appeal, the Fact-Finding Account is untenable. I provide an alternative account of diagnosis (the Normative Account) according to which diagnosis functions as an exercitive (i.e., a speech act concerned with enacting normative permissions and expectations). The Normative Account is able to handle the challenges faced by the Fact-Finding Account and validates the importance of diagnosis.

Doxastic Wrongs, Expanded

A person doxastically wrongs someone in virtue of what they believe. Philosophers so far have explored doxastic wronging in the context of beliefs whose content are about the injured party. In this paper, I argue that we can doxastically wrong one another without explicitly believing anything about the person we wrong. In other words, a person can be doxastically wronged by a belief that is not directly about them. I argue that beliefs about social groups, beliefs about oneself, and beliefs about the world more broadly all have the potential to doxastically wrong. I do so by arguing that people do not exist in a vacuum, and we do not mentally represent them as such. We recognize that people exist in relation to other people in a shared world. Therefore, our beliefs about other people and the world in which we all live impact the way we mentally represent, and therefore relate to, particular people.

Degrees of Consent

When philosophers talk about 'consent', they are often talking about it in the context of biomedical ethics or sexual ethics. In addition to these "high stakes" contexts, though, people consent to more minor things everyday. When I go to the hairdresser, I consent to the stylist touching and altering my hair. When I see a stranger searching their bag, I consent to letting them borrow my pen. Consent is functioning the same way in all of these instances: by providing my consent, I signal my intention to exercise a normative power, namely, to grant a permission. The standards that must be met in order to succeed in granting that permission vary, however. If you ask most people, they will say that the stranger who lies to me about what he intends to write still has my morally valid consent to use my pen, but a doctor who lies to me about what she intends to amputate does not have my morally valid consent to operate on me despite any words that I say. I give an account of consent according to which consent is graded and multidimensional. It is graded in that one can consent more or less to something. The amount of consent needed in a given circumstance will depend on what it is the person is consenting to and the purpose for which we are evaluating consent. The standards of consent in different contexts will be a function of the degree to which four features are satisfied: ontology, voluntarism, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

Dissertation: Caring For Myself

Every relationship in our lives, from the closest relationship we have to our dearest loved ones to the fleeting and superficial relationships we have to the strangers passing us on the street, is subject to moral constraints in some way or another. These constraints determine how we can permissibly act towards, interact with, and even think about the people around us. In general, closer relationships come with more stringent constraints. This is especially true in cases where someone is dependent on us for their own well-being, such as the relationship between a parent and child. The closest and most long-lasting relationship one has is with oneself. And yet, it is controversial, philosophically speaking, to say that one’s relationship with oneself is subject to moral constraints. There are a number of different ways I might be said to do wrong by myself for failing to eat my greens, for example. First, I might be acting against my best interests in doing so–this is acting imprudently. Second, I might be failing to do something that I believe I should do–this is (one way of) acting irrationally. Third, I might be failing in a duty or obligation that I owe to myself–this is acting immorally. It is this third way of “doing wrong by myself” that I am interested in. In this dissertation, I argue that I do owe it to myself to eat my daily greens, among a host of other things. I owe it to myself to finish this dissertation. I owe it to myself to enter into and maintain fulfilling relationships. Perhaps most importantly, I owe it to myself to remain committed to the task of becoming the sort of person I want to be. I argue that people have a number of obligations to themselves. Because of this, people can wrong themselves in a variety of ways. The dissertation does not wholly focus on ways in which we might do wrong by ourselves. I end on a positive note, exploring the ways that we might do right by ourselves. I explore what it means to have a virtuous relationship with oneself, and examine whether (and how) self-directed actions can be said to be praiseworthy.

(Planned) Chapters

Chapters marked with an asterisk* have a working draft.

Chapter 1: The Gravity of Self-Directed Duties*

Chapter 2: Reflexivity and Rights

Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt (2024) argue that there is an “asymmetry of possibilities” that explains why we have some rights against others that we cannot have against ourselves (or, at least, how we can violate the rights of others when we cannot violate the same right against ourselves). I cannot violate a self-directed right against stalking, for example, because it is impossible for me to stalk myself. This does not demonstrate that there a fundamental asymmetry between self and other, but instead just highlights a contingent asymmetry of possibilities.There is a second asymmetry of possibilites that Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt do not examine. They imagine those actions that are only possible in relation to another person, but there are also actions that one can only take towards oneself: reflexive actions. There is a unique way that we think about and act with ourselves in a first-personal sense. In this chapter, I argue that there are reflexive actions and mental states that are subject to moral contraints. If this is true, then there are ways in which one has moral obligations to herself that she does not have to anyone else.

Chapter 3: The Limits of Self-Sacrifice*

There is surprisingly a near consensus in contemporary moral philosophy that suggests there are no moral limits to permissible self-sacrifice. The common idea seems to be that self-sacrifice is always permissible but it is not required beyond a certain limit. In this chapter, I challenge this consensus. I do so by appealing to self-directed duties. I argue that self-sacrifice can involve violating a duty one has to oneself and, in these cases, the agent is obligated to not self-sacrifice. This can true even when the agent seemingly has her own consent so long as acting on that consent is incompatible with her duty of self-respect.

Chapter 4: On the (Non)Triviality of Consenting to Oneself

In this chapter, I challenge the assumption that securing one's own consent is as easy as making a decision to act. I argue that there are two reasons such an intuition is appealing, but both of them are ultimately mistaken. The first is that it is easy to confuse believing that one has consented with actually providing morally valid consent. This problem is alleviated by drawing attention to cases of interpersonal consent where a person believes himself to have consented but has not succeeded in doing so. The second is that it is easy to think of cases in which a person successfully, and seemingly effortlessly, secures their own morally valid consent. By expanding the set of cases under consideration, I will show that securing one's own consent is not as simple as easy cases make it seem.

Chapter 5: A Chapter on Self-Harm

In this chapter, I intend to argue that "self-harm" as we usually conceive of it (e.g., cutting one's wrists) is not always morally wrong.

Chapter 5: Doing Right By Oneself

The other chapters of this dissertation have focused primarily on the ways in which we can wrong ourselves. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the way(s) in which we can behave in a morally virtuous relationship to ourselves. I will examine what it means to have a virtuous relationship with oneself, sourced in self-compassion that facilitates opportunities for the agent to act in meaningful and morally good ways. I also explore what it means to be praiseworthy for the ways in which we treat ourselves: what sorts of acts and mental states deserve praise? Who can appropriately praise us? How similar is this sort of praise to praise in more standard (other-directed) cases? The purpose of this chapter is to examine not the ways in which we might morally fail in relation to ourselves, but the ways in which we might flourish.