Research Areas

Moral Responsibility

My research in moral responsibility explores the interplay of how we ought to appraise the actions of people with psychological disabilities and how people with psychological disabilities ought to approach the management of their agential differences. I defend the view that the difference between compulsion and weakness of will is not a matter of an agent’s degree of control over her behavior, but is instead a matter of whether the agent would approve to some degree of acting on the desire that she does for some aim other than to get rid of it. I leverage this distinction to propose a new account of moral responsibility which can explain exemption on the basis of compulsion, while simultaneously holding that people can be responsible for behavior that is spontaneous, initiated by subconscious motivation, out of character, or brought about in a fit of emotion. Importantly, my view has the resources to explain how a person who is exempt from direct responsibility for their compulsive action can be appraisable for delaying, managing, treating, or attempting to resist their compulsive urge.

My first book will set out a way of thinking about the ethics and politics of this kind of psychological management. We appraise people for what they do on the basis of the social meaning we attach to their actions. But, I argue, our current conventions that set these social meanings are in need of revision, as they unfairly privilege certain ways of being psychologically constituted over others. Having established the conditions for moral agency of people with psychological disabilities, my future work in this area will use the idea that different kinds of agential functioning are best seen as minoritized statuses to intervene in debates about the ethics of consent, accessibility, and paternalistic intervention.

Philosophy of Death

In my work in the philosophy of death, I am interested in how differing agential orientations with regards to the importance of life projects and life narratives can make reasonable drastically different attitudes towards death and towards one’s own mortality. I argue that immortality presents a risk of boredom not shared by mortal lives, though it may be surmountable for those with certain agential constitutions. I also argue that living forever would also significantly impact practical reasoning for those who are motivated to take on certain projects because of the identity-expressive function that devoting a proportion of their life to a particular pursuit plays for them.

For mortals, I defend the view that it is rational for our interest in the circumstances of our own deaths to weigh strongly against other interests, as life endings can play a special role for many people in their lifetime well-being. We can vindicate the rationality of a wide-range of choices about undertaking life-saving measures because, while prudence requires choosing to live the best possible life for yourself, just what this life-course looks like will vary widely across individuals as it is perspectival and non-summative. I am currently working on defending the view that satisfying a desire to die in a certain way can positively contribute to one’s lifetime well-being. In future research I plan to build on this idea as well as my account of agency in clinical depression to write on the ethics of suicide prevention policy. In short, I plan to argue that policymakers have a duty to recognize and remedy the conditions that make suicide an attractive choice for some, which I’ll show must involve more than just offering the suicidal the possibility of “better days ahead.”