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ESSAYS
ARTICLES
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).
Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy
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.
WORKS-IN-PROGESS
"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 morality of sexual objectification, the essay claims, 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.
"Wilhelm Von Humboldt: Rehabilitating the Forgotten Philosopher of Freedom"
Partial Draft Available
The dedication of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty contains, because of this very inclusion, the remark for which Wilhelm von Humboldt is best known: “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” An inviting principle. But, that this is the context of his present political-philosophical claim to fame appears to have had some consequences for his readership. F.A. Hayek, in Margaret Thatcher’s self-declared Conservative credo The Constitution of Liberty, calls Humboldt the “greatest [German] philosopher of freedom,” and Mill’s epigraphic quote was also the concluding remark of the book. In the first volume of the New Individualist Review (the Chicago outfit disseminating much of the libertarian-conservative thought of the mid-century, including publications from Friedman, Mises, Stigler, Buckley, Kirk, and others), editor-in-chief Ralph Raico begins a series entitled “Great Individualists of the Past,” discussing historical thinkers in the lineage of their own ideological project, and Humboldt was the first subject of this series. The Limits of State Action, his major political-philosophical work, is presently published by Liberty Fund, a libertarian-conservative think tank which promotes texts purportedly in conformance with its ideals.
In my view, Humboldt belongs to a group of enlightenment liberals whose political philosophies have been appropriated in recent decades for right-libertarian purposes, but whose principles, properly conceived, often oppose these purposes. Adam Smith scholars, facing a similar appropriation, have had to dispel the clouds of misconception that formed over mid-century Chicago skies. John Locke’s theory of property isn’t so straightforwardly friendly to the moneyed-man. And J.S. Mill’s relation to socialism is today far more obscured than his relation to so-called ‘classical liberalism’. The task of the essay is to similarly rehabilitate the obscured image of Humboldt, and it does so principally by examining his liberal theory of alienation--grounded in the idea of the human being as a free, developing being, concerned with securing and heightening certain moral powers.
"AI, Autonomy, and Alienation"
Under Construction
Some recent work argues that algorithmic recommender systems degrade a moral skill: the judicious allocation of our attention. Usage of these systems cuts into our capacity to spend our time wisely, or to hone in on a given issue, or to clear-eyedly deliberate about what issue to hone in on. This framework for thinking about the issue is associated with virtue-theoretic approaches: there are a set of virtues of character, among them is judicious allocation of one's attention, and we impede ourselves from the development of this virtue, or we develop a corresponding vice, when our attention is habitually governed by AI recommender systems.
I'd like to suggest a different way of thinking about the issue--what is at stake in the fact that we no longer mosey over to the book-case to select for ourselves a text with which to dedicatedly engage, but instead are confronted, bombarded with content that has been selected for us by recommender systems whose principal end is the perpetuation of our engagement? What has taken place is a cessation of our autonomy over our own attention, and it entails more systematic social-psychological and phenomenological consequences--concerning the way that we relate to things more generally--than the above approach suggests. Attention just is the phenomenology of our relation to objects, and if we degrade our autonomy over our attention, we degrade our more general orientation to the objects we relate to, and the things that matter. We find ourselves more passively and more distantly relating to things which matter, the loss of autonomy is felt as the loss of the object as ours, and the theory which describes this loss is the theory of alienation. Mindless scrolling, mindless watching, mindless listening--these habits are not just dangerous distractions, we don't just spend too much time on them instead of on the things that matter--they are all-the-way-down infecting the orientation with which we attend to the things that matter--mindlessly.
POPULAR WORK
"Child's Play"
An essay based on observations through my former office window, outside of which was the schoolyard of John Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. The essay attempts to draw certain lessons for our social and political lives from the study of the sociality of children, as was Dewey's founding hope for the school.
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