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ESSAYS
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
"Parents & Peers: A Kantian Moral Development"
Forthcoming, JESP
This essay offers a narrative of moral development for Kantian practical philosophy. It does so by bringing together elemental features of the two most prominent traditions concerned with the moral psychology of moral development: the Freudian-psychoanalytic tradition, principally concerning itself with an authority relation (the parent-child relation), and the Piagetian-stage-theory tradition, principally concerning itself with an equality relation (the peer relation). The fundamental Freudian insight is that our ability to subject impulsiveness to rule is explained by our introjecting the parental figure as an authoritative aspect of the psyche, the superego. David Velleman suitably revised this insight to be fit for Kantian purposes: our idealization of the parent supports their introjection not just as superego but as ego-ideal, and thus represents a genuine standard of practical reason. But, the parental relation cannot be the whole story, because of the paternalistic nature of that relation: moral persons are self-legislative, and the authority of the parent is licensed by a recognition of the child as less than fully self-legislative. The fundamental Piagetian insight, making up for this lack, is that peer relations, constituted by acts of co-legislation, are predicated on the reciprocal recognition of self-legislation, e.g. children’s games require and respect the authoritative assent of each. But, nothing perfect, Piaget denies necessary, positive contributions from the parental relation—authority cannot give way to equality without contradiction. In showing how authority can give way to equality, as providing its necessary basis, we bring together parents and peers as essential contributors to a complete narrative of moral development.
"Peoples as Persons: Rousseau, Democracy, and the Moral Personhood of the State"
Forthcoming, Mind
The social contract tradition, I conjecture, is constituted by an understanding of peoples as persons. I explore the meaning of this conjecture in investigating one substantial contribution to the tradition: Rousseau’s. I argue that ‘matters of political principle’ in Rousseau originate from (1) considering the autonomy of individual citizens, and (2) considering the autonomy of the whole of the people as a person. It is in the systematic consideration of the nature of persons, as principally defined with respect to a capacity for autonomy (self-legislation), that the heart of his social contract theory may be understood. The first level of consideration produces centrally a constraint on the content of laws (that their end is the common good), and the second produces centrally a constraint on the form of laws, or the way that they may be permissibly given (that legislative right remains always the people’s alone, forbidding despotism and representation). The latter allows us to understand what we’ve previously had trouble understanding: Rousseau's principled argument for the inalienability of sovereignty (and so more concretely, the requirement of a popular legislature). I suggest this as a case study for the symbiotic relationship of our thinking about persons and our thinking about political philosophy; further than our idea of the person delimiting how citizens may be treated or relate to each other, the idea of the person delimits also the shape of social-institutional organization (that is, in conformance with the theorist's conception of what it means for the social totality to be a self-legislating person).
"Lying as Betrayal"
Draft Available
Consider the following: a hand moves, a knife penetrates fleshy tissue, and a heart stops beating. This is a merely phenomenal description of a series of events, using what appears to be neutral language, in the same way we would talk about planets orbiting or objects colliding. But this series of events, being also a relation of persons performing actions, can be represented in some moral terms: this was a murder. Murdering is something we surely have some kind of obligation not to do. It seems that certain terms, like murder, are necessarily laden with some moral content, or are defined with respect to distinctively moral features. I want to say more about what exactly that could mean, and I will do so by examining a case that I take to represent the contours of moral language in an especially rich way: that of the lie.
I think that concern with moral language is not only important in sorting out our folk conceptual schemes, but is also at the heart of rule-based moral thought. If one is to construct a system of moral rules constituted by injunctions like ‘do not murder,’ ‘do not lie,’ then these terms, ‘murder’ and ‘lie,’ must be understood in their technical sense as defined with respect to some peculiar moral content—defined with respect to some feature that is essentially wrong-making. Understanding what exactly it means to be governed by such rules in practical life is at least in part a matter of getting clear about that peculiar content. In this essay I attempt to get clearer about the peculiar moral content of ‘lie’ in its technical sense, a project most thoroughly engaged in the Kantian tradition. Lying is, I contend, a sort of betrayal.
"The Refuge of Trust, an Essay on Sexual Morality"
Draft Available
The central claim of the essay is that the morality of sexual objectification is clarified by keeping in view the way we are so constituted as to be objectified, by keeping in view our constitution as persons (I offer a ‘subject-object’ conception drawn from the tradition concerned with objectification, which I first identify with Kant, tracing a brief history up to feminist theorists, especially Beauvoir and Dworkin). Nussbaum’s landmark article charges Kant and the sexual conservatives’ treatment of sexual objectification with methodologically reducing the body and the genital organs to objects, and so claims that they are thereby themselves guilty of a pernicious form of objectification. Instead, she claims, we ought to ‘humanize’ the body and the genital organs, recognizing them as part of the humanity in us. This essay claims that Nussbaum has it exactly backwards—Kant and the sexual conservatives have a sexual morality that is already humanistic in just this way, and furthermore, this shared commitment of Nussbaum’s and the conservatives’ is dubious, so they are in guilty company. The body and the genital organs are objects (of a peculiar sort). Objectification does not consist in being treated as an object (persons are a sort of object), it consists in being treated as a mere object. The morality of being treated as a sexual object turns on the justifiable trust one may have in not therein being reduced to a mere object.
POPULAR WORK
"Child's Play"
An essay drawn from observations through my former office window, outside of which was the schoolyard of John Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago
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