RESEARCH
Research Interests
My research lies at the intersection between intersection of moral psychology and virtue theory. I am currently working on projects concerned with:
- the nature and ethics of contempt, and especially its relationship to self-respect
- the value and nature of honor
- why continence is not sufficient for flourishing
- forgivingness (particularly as related both to feminist arguments about its appropriateness and its relationship to agency)
- the role of attention and love in moral development
Publications
“Moral Transformation, Identity, and Practice.” American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 6 (2023): 161-177.
Standard ways of conceptualizing and measuring moral development implicitly privilege the growth of moral judgment over moral sensitivity, moral motivation, and moral habits by too often conflating improvement in moral judgment with holistic moral development. I argue here that if we care about philosophy's transformative possibilities as a way of life, we should adopt a more robust and holistic account of moral development. I illustrate this through an examination of the Character Project, which I created to help students engage in their own deliberate ethical transformation through self-directed, individualized, and concentrated practice. Finally, I conclude with a discussion about how to appropriately and fairly design and assess this kind of deeply personal learning.
“Empathy and Loving Attention.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92 (2022): 209-227.
The failure to understand the needs, beliefs, and values of others is widely blamed on a lack of empathy, which has been touted in recent years as the necessary ingredient for bringing us together and ultimately for tackling issues of social justice and harmony. In this essay, I explore whether empathy really can serve the role it has been tasked with. To answer this question, I will first identify what empathy is and why its champions believe it plays such an essential role in social life. With this in mind, I contend that promoting empathy on its own may make solidarity among diverse populations more difficult to achieve and undermine social reconciliation. Instead, I argue for a different approach that begins with acknowledging our self-oriented perspective and how it shapes what we see, appreciate, and interpret, before turning to others with a kind of loving attention. Unlike empathy, loving attention allows us to see others as they really are, not as we imagine we would be in their shoes, and is that kind of perception that is necessary for bridging divides and building solidarity in our contemporary world.
“Why Aristotle’s Virtuous Agent Won’t Forgive: Aristotle on Sungnōmē, Praotēs, and Megalopsychia.” In Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment, ed. by Paula Satne and Krisanna M. Scheiter (Springer, 2022): 189-205.
For Aristotle, some wrongdoers do not deserve blame, and the virtuous judge should extend sungnōmē, a correct judgment about what is equitable, under the appropriate excusing circumstances. Aristotle’s virtuous judge, however, does not forgive; the wrongdoer is excused from blame in the first place, rather than being forgiven precisely because she is blameworthy. Additionally, the judge does not fail to blame because she wishes to be merciful or from natural feeling, but instead, because that is the equitable action to take under the circumstances. Moreover, while Aristotle does claim in his discussions of the virtues of megalopsychia and praotēs that the virtuous person will sometimes fail to become angry at blameworthy wrongdoers, Aristotle’s reasons for repudiating anger or forestalling blame have little to do with the sorts of reasons that one would or could be forgiving for. Although the Aristotelian virtuous agent does let go of anger for her own reasons, she does not forgive. As a result, I argue that since Aristotle’s account of equity entails that forgiveness is positively vicious, forgivingness is not merely a virtue left out of Aristotle’s account, but is incompatible with his account.
“Completeness, Self-Sufficiency, and Intimacy in Seneca’s Account of Friendship.” Ancient Philosophy Today 3, 2 (2021): 200-221.
Examining Seneca’s account of friendship produces an interpretative puzzle: if the good of the Stoic sage is already both complete and self-sufficient, how can friendship be a good? I reject the solution that friendship is simply a preferred indifferent instead of a good and argue that though Seneca’s account can consistently explain both why friendship’s nature as a good does not threaten the completeness or the self-sufficiency of the sage, Stoic friends must choose between intimate friendships that leave them vulnerable or impersonal friendships that lack intimacy but undermine their happiness. I argue, however, that this resolution to the conflict shows why we ought to reject the Stoic model of friendship.
”Sungnōmē in Aristotle." Apeiron 50, 3 (2017): 311-333.
Aristotle claims that in some extenuating circumstances, the correct response to the wrongdoer is sungnōmē instead of blame. Sungnōmē has a wide spectrum of meanings that include aspects of sympathy, pity, fellow-feeling, pardon, and excuse, but the dominant interpretation among scholars takes Aristotle’s meaning to correspond most closely to forgiveness. Thus, it is commonly held that the virtuous Aristotelian agent ought to forgive wrongdoers in specific extenuating circumstances. Against the more popular forgiveness interpretation, I begin by defending a positive account of sungnōmē as the correct judgment that a wrongdoer deserves excuse since she was not blameworthy. I then argue that since sungnōmē is merited on the grounds of fairness, this shows that both the forgiveness interpretation and a third, alternative interpretation of sungnōmē as sympathy mischaracterize both the justification for sungnōmē and its nature. Moreover, I argue that Aristotle not only lacks an account of forgiveness but in fact, that his account of blame is incompatible with forgiveness altogether.