Research

Why Desperate Times (But Only Desperate Times) Call for Consequentialism 
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol. 8, ed. Mark Timmons (2018).
final version (please cite to this version)
pre-print

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level – that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce the best consequences, for example, except when those consequences involve saving millions of lives. This view is known as “threshold deontology.” While clearly controversial, threshold deontology has significant appeal. But it has proven quite difficult to provide a non-ad hoc justification for it.  This chapter develops a new justification, showing that acting like a threshold deontologist is a good strategy for being moral, given our uncertainty and imperfect moral knowledge. And failing to use good strategies for being moral is, itself, morally bad.  

What Decision Theory Can’t Tell Us About Moral Uncertainty
Philosophical Studies 178: 3085–3105 (2021).
final version (please cite to this version)
pre-print

Often, we need to decide how to act, while we’re unsure what morality calls for.  There is a growing philosophical literature on this type of moral uncertainty.  But much of it asks how to rationally pursue the goal of acting morally, using decision-theoretic models to address that question.  In this paper, I provide the negative argument that these popular approaches won’t be able to answer crucial questions about how we should navigate moral uncertainty.  

An Ethically Risky Profession?
forthcoming Washington University Jurisprudence Review
(for a copy, please email me)

Traditional accounts of legal ethics put lawyers in a difficult position, requiring them to take on surprisingly high risks of wrongdoing when navigating the narrow passage between the differing demands of legal ethics.  And this occurs even if we accept the standard conception of legal ethics on its own terms, without worrying about possible clashes with external norms.  According to the standard conception of lawyers’ ethical responsibilities, lawyers should be willing to “zealously” advocate for their clients – to further their clients’ interests right up to the limits of the law.  Often, a lawyer would be seen as violating ethical obligations to the client if they decline to take effective, legally permissible steps out of moral squeamishness, or because they’re inclined to be generous with adversaries.  But these same, traditional views take lawyers to be ethically obligated not to violate the law.  On the standard conception, lawyers must be willing to approach that line for their clients, but not cross it.  And both a lawyer’s duties to the client and their duties to obey the law are treated as moral obligations.  According to standard accounts of professional ethics, falling short of these duties is a moral failing.  Navigating these two requirements, though -- finding the line, but not crossing it -- seems to require a very high level of clarity about both the law and the legally-relevant facts.  And that clarity may be difficult to achieve in ordinary legal practice.  Real life involves uncertainty, about both the law and legally-relevant facts, often with too little time to resolve it.  But the structure of lawyers’ obligations means that when they face uncertainty, they may not be able to use one approach that’s common in day-to-day life: avoiding a questionable activity just in case it’s morally wrong and opting for an alternative that’s clearly morally permissible.  For a lawyer, there may not be an alternative that’s clearly morally permissible.  Instead, this avoidance strategy would often mean either erring in the direction of violating an obligation to a client or erring in the direction of violating obligations to the law.  If standard accounts of lawyers’ ethical obligations are correct, then we’re asking lawyers to assume an unusually high risk of moral wrongdoing. And it may be unfair to lawyers to expect them to take this on.  In other areas, our legal system provides standards for what it takes to move from one way of handling an ambiguous circumstance to another – “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” or a “preponderance of the evidence,” for example.  These are messy and imperfect.  But lawyers are left with even less – the equivalent of telling a jury to “be sure to get it right” and saying very little about what to do when it’s unclear what that involves.

Response to Adam Kolber’s ‘Punishment and Moral Risk’ (Invited Commentary)
University of Illinois Law Review Online, Vol. 2018, no. 2 (2018): 175-183.
final version (no log-in required)

Adam Kolber argues against retributivist theories of punishment, based on considerations of moral uncertainty.  In this reply, I suggest that Kolber’s argument will not have the implications he supposes, in part because, if it’s able to raise difficulties for retributivism, similar problems will arise for a wide variety of other approaches to punishment.

Ethics for Fallible People (Dissertation)
extended dissertation summary
(for a copy of the full text, please email me)

Our moral judgments are fallible, and we’re often uncertain what morality requires.  I argue that, in the face of these challenges, it’s not only rational to use effective procedures for trying to be moral – we have a moral responsibility to do so, and being reckless when navigating moral uncertainty, is, itself, a form of moral wrongdoing.  These strategic requirements present a large class of under-explored norms of morality.  I use these norms to address moral and social questions concerning, for example, interpersonal toleration, exceptions to moral rules in high-stakes cases, and principal-agent relationships (such as those between lawyers and clients).

Losing Privacy and Living a Sound Bite Life
(for a draft, please email me)

When we’re living under observation, whether from government monitors or social media followers, not only will others see pieces of our lives, they will also overlook a great deal. Surveillance algorithms may only call attention to activities with certain features, social media followers may browse past half of our posts, and no one experiences the full context of our words and actions.  This dynamic creates a pressure for us to lead more fragmented lives, creating strings of soundbites that seem justified and understandable when encountered in isolation.  But, many of the things that give our lives meaning require development over time in ways that are in tension with this type of fragmented living.  For this reason, living with limited privacy can make it more difficult to lead meaningful lives, in a way that is under-recognized in debates about privacy.  I also suggest that this may help shed light on what is being “chilled” (and why it matters) when privacy scholars worry that privacy limitations have a “chilling effect” on innocent behavior.

Intimate Concepts

We use concepts, like city or money, to help us understand and talk about the world.  But some concepts also help us understand ourselves and navigate our intimate relationships – concepts like lesbian, having sex, genderqueer, and love.  These concepts raise distinctive challenges.  On the one hand, we want to understand our own, widely varied, personal experiences; on the other hand, we want to be able to communicate with the wider world.  The concepts that will do the best job at the first task – improved self-understanding – likely won’t be the same person to person.  The conceptual frameworks that may be illuminating for one person may just be stifling or confusing for another, and maximally inclusive, general concepts might not have enough content to do the needed hermeneutical work.  But piles of very specific, bespoke concepts create challenges for the second task – communicating with the wider world.  For that purpose, the general concepts can have advantages – effective concepts might seem to be those that are widely understood in fairly uniform ways.  So, we ask intimate concepts to perform two very different jobs – and the requirements of those jobs suggest very different ways of developing our conceptual frameworks.  I explore this dilemma, look at what it can tell us about when to trust people’s claims about themselves, and suggest some ways forward.

Meaningful People

Much of the literature on finding meaning in life focuses on what people with meaningful lives are doing or experiencing – what projects they’re undertaking or relationships they are forming.  But, I argue that we don’t just want lives with meaningful activities or experiences, we want to be meaningful people – we want it to matter that it’s us leading our lives and doing those activities.  This helps to explain why, for example, a life that involved spending 40 hours a week pushing a button that saved lives with each button push, nevertheless, might seem empty or short on meaning.  It might be useful, but the button-pusher could reasonably worry that they were irrelevant to their own life and could be exchanged for someone else.  I use this framework to make sense of some distinctive features of discussions of meaning in life and explore the implications of thinking about meaning in this way. 

Trying to Be Moral, Morally
(for a draft, please email me)

In our daily lives, we’re often unsure what being moral requires, and our moral decision-making is far from perfect.  For example, we might wonder whether to become a vegetarian, whether it’s okay to break a small promise for a large benefit, or whether we should lie to a friend for the friend’s own good.  But we need to act anyway.  I develop a framework for thinking about moral norms for trying to be moral, and provide a positive argument that morality does make claims of this type – that we morally ought to use good strategies for navigating moral uncertainty (and are acting wrongly if we don’t).  Much of the current literature asks what it’s rational to do in the face of moral uncertainty, employing decision-theoretic models to address that question.  This paper provides the foundation for a different type of conversation about moral uncertainty: one that asks what guidance morality, itself, provides to fallible, uncertain moral agents who are nevertheless trying to be moral.  And if it’s true that we are morally compelled to use good procedures for trying to be moral, these responsibilities present a wide swath of under-explored moral norms that may ultimately help shed light on other moral and political puzzles.

Disappearing Moral Responsibilities: A Problem for the Ethics of Principal-Agent Relationships
(for a draft, please email me)

When we make decisions under ordinary circumstances, we are responsible for making morally good decisions -- for ensuring that our choices don’t impermissibly harm others, for example, or for making decisions that fulfill imperfect duties of kindness or generosity.  But sometimes we delegate our decision-making to others, perhaps asking financial professionals to plan our investments, or authorizing a lawyer to navigate a legal dispute in our stead.  It’s commonplace to delegate decisions in principal-agent relationships like these, but I argue that standard norms surrounding this delegation generate under-appreciated moral problems: they suggest that sometimes the principal’s responsibilities for making morally good decisions simply disappear when the decision-making power is assigned to an agent, neither being retained by the principal, nor transferred to the agent making the decisions.  This raises problems for standard approaches to principal-agent ethics, especially given the morally significant – and sometimes morally problematic – decisions that agents make on our behalves.  I introduce some of the difficulties that flow from this structure, including the way that it leads ordinary people to provide material support to terrible practices, and removes opportunities for discretionary kindness.  I close the paper by beginning to sketch approaches that may be fruitful in addressing these problems.

“Speech and Social Media: Making the Problem Easier”

The structure of social media platforms makes debates about content moderation harder than they have to be.  We argue about appropriate content restrictions for posts, in general, as though there’s one appropriate answer across a wide variety of contexts.  This is a mistake.  Restricting comments in a family’s 10-person Facebook group can seem analogous to regulating the content of baby album captions.  But restricting the content of public posts that are widely suggested by a platform’s algorithms can sometimes seem more like being selective in choosing books for Oprah’s Book Club.  There are thorny, ethical questions involved in deciding how to handle these different cases, but it would be surprising if the right answers were the same.  Platform design and content restrictions need to better distinguish these different contexts.  Trying to develop one set of rules for very different contexts generates unfairness and intractable debates.

“Rights in an Uncertain World”

Rights theorists disagree about whether positive, socio-economic rights are importantly different from other rights.  Some argue that these rights aren’t meaningfully distinct.  Others suggest that they are different in ways that makes them lower-priority, or that leave corresponding duties absent or discretionary – if they recognize positive, socio-economic rights at all.  I suggest that there is something importantly different about the relationship between rights and duties in these cases, but not that makes them lower-priority or illusory.

Often, the relevant duties are characterized as imperfect, or discretionary in their particulars (duties of charity are frequently seen as imperfect in this way, for example).  But I argue that many “imperfect” duties are better understood, not as cases when duty-bearers are entitled to discretion in choosing what to do, but rather as cases where there is a fact of the matter about our duties – while rights-holders sometimes need to defer to duty-bearers’ identification of their own duties.  What’s distinctive about these cases is that the content of our duties will typically depend on features that aren’t obvious from an isolated interaction (e.g., our resources, our past actions, our needs).  In contrast, it can be fairly clear from a momentary observation that someone is violating a duty not to assault, for example.  As a result, rights-bearers and bystanders may be morally obligated to engage in some deference to duty-bearer’s judgments in the first case, but not the second.  Doing otherwise can run an excessive risk of wronging the duty-bearers, by forcing them to perform acts that aren’t within their duties after all.  This shift from thinking of duty-bearers having discretion, to thinking of them as being entitled to deference can help to address two puzzles about rights: it can explain differences between permissible enforcement efforts by governments and permissible self-help by rights-holders (who may be in different epistemic circumstances); and it can show that when positive, socio-economic rights lack readily-identifiable, corresponding duties, this may be an epistemic problem, rather than an indication that there aren’t duties.