Works in Progress
"The Contingency of Moral Personhood"
Some accounts of living through oppression portray it as a sort of living death. I argue that taking this peculiar feature of the moral psychology of oppression philosophically seriously reveals a novel understanding of the interpersonal nature of our moral status, what I call “the contingency of moral personhood.” In this account, I argue that oppression has the capacity to turn its victims into objects, and that this is a moral-metaphysical transformation and not merely a distortion in victims’ moral self-understanding. Our moral status, therefore, is contingent in a serious way on the interpersonal conditions in which it exists. I then contrast this novel view with the explanation that such a moral psychology typically receives – namely a deflationary account which regards victims of oppression as merely holding mistaken beliefs about themselves and therefore in need of epistemic intervention. Against this deflationary account, I argue that the moral psychology of oppression is better understood as a reasons-responsive phenomenon regarding changes in our moral ontology, and that victims of oppression are uniquely positioned to recognize the moral-metaphysical truth to which their moral psychology is properly responding. As a result, the proper intervention is not epistemic but practical – reentering into emancipatory moral relation with victims of oppression and rebuilding the interpersonal ties that support the full actualization of moral personhood.
“Emancipatory Revenge: Moral Personhood and the Rationality of Revenge”
This paper argues for the rational intelligibility of revenge by presenting a novel account of a moral good that it can yield. It begins with a discussion of the predominant view of revenge that claims it can yield no such benefit, as well as an application of this “no benefits” view to a fictional case of revenge. This application reveals the “no benefits” view’s conceptual insufficiency in making sense of the moral psychology of those who seek revenge. The paper then defends an alternate account of revenge in which the moral psychology of the avenger becomes rationally intelligible. It does so by way of presenting a novel account of the interpersonal conditions of moral personhood, which reveal what is termed “the contingency of moral personhood.” On this account, revenge is rationally intelligible when it responds to harms that have undermined the full moral actualization of the victim, and therefore seeks to reinstate a moral personality that was undermined by the prior wrongdoing of revenge’s target.
"Personhood Under Patriarchy"
Living as a woman under patriarchy has the capacity to transform someone into something. I argue for this claim, emphasizing that it is a moral-metaphysical claim about the constituent parts of the world and not a moral-psychological claim about the distortions of the female psyche. To do this, I conduct a philosophical close reading of the 1974 American film, Wanda, showing that the titular character’s complicated journey through a patriarchal landscape reveals important dimensions of the ethics of patriarchal oppression, objectification, and self-formation. In particular, I show that the directorial choices made in depicting Wanda’s journey throughout the film illuminate a crucial element of attempting to be a full person under patriarchy: that where one fails, one can become a “thing” – that is, something whose use by others cannot be objected to on grounds of a violation of moral personhood.
"Pathological Ignorance"
The Covid-19 pandemic has been marked by a profound and widespread ignorance about most of the scientific and biological facts about Covid-19 itself--what I call "pandemic ignorance." Making use of the literature on ignorance in social epistemology, I argue that pandemic ignorance is a more general form of "abled ignorance," which reinforces and exacerbates ableism under late-stage capitalist economies. As such, I argue that pandemic ignorance is both an epistemic and a moral failure.