Research Statement (PDF)

My primary research interests are in the philosophy of humor, metaethics, applied ethics, philosophy of language, and epistemology mostly approached from a neo-pragmatist perspective. I also work on the origins of normativity and the philosophy of human rights and dabble in the philosophy of sports and games.

You can follow my work on Academia.edu or PhilPeople.

Dissertation

In my dissertation, I wrestle with the question of what we're doing when we use moral language with the aim of addressing some problems that arise for accounts of meaning for moral vocabulary. I argue that we can best address puzzles about the motivational oomph of moral judgments, the objectivity of moral discourse, and the pull of relativism by attending to the norms that govern the use of moral terms and that we can explain the normative pragmatics of moral discourse in terms of the utility that it has for the beings who use it. The resulting account explains meaning in terms of norms governing use and explains why we have a practice with those particular norms in terms of the evolutionary advantage it likely gave our early human ancestors. One big upshot of the account is that it provides a framework for understanding of the pragmatics of moral discourse that allows us to see under what conditions this practice is likely to be used successfully and under what conditions its likely to fail. In this way, it advances Rorty's conception of solidarity by revealing the conditions of its possibility.

If this piques your interest, you can click here to read the abstract.

Current and Future Projects

I am currently pursuing two distinct but ultimately related research projects. The first extends a view in metaethics that I began to develop in my dissertation. The second is in the philosophy of humor.

In metaethics, I defend a view of moral language that explains the way we use moral vocabulary directly in terms of the discursive norms that govern its use and, furthermore, explains these norms in terms of the function they enable the practice of moral discourse to fulfill for the beings who engage in it. This use-based account of meaning, which expands on inferentialism and brings it into contact with recent work in evolutionary psychology, was the core project of my dissertation, “Metaethics for Neo-Pragmatists,” in which I argued that the inferential, authority, and pragmatic norms of moral discourse are best explained in terms of its evolutionary utility in maintaining an atmosphere in which ongoing social coordination could flourish.

In a burgeoning book project that builds on this foundation I am exploring the relationship between trust and the standing hold others accountable to shared moral norms. The standing to hold accountable is integral to well-functioning social-normative practices (both the ‘merely’ discursive ones and ‘on the ground’ practical ones), but standing is often undermined by a lack of trust among members of the social group. In particular, when agents either have reason to distrust or no reason to trust that those whose standing they recognize will reciprocally recognize their own standing to hold accountable, I argue, it is rational for them to withhold recognition of the other’s standing to hold. In such cases, recognizing the other’s standing to hold one accountable would institute a kind of hierarchical relationship that threatens the recognizer’s agency.

Engaging with work on blame, holding, and moral responsibility as well as speech-act theory, I argued in “Trust, Communities, and the Standing to Hold Accountable” that this breakdown of trust helps to explain why so many of us met with rejections of standing when we tried to hold friends, family, and other acquaintances accountable for their support of Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential election. But this raises two important questions. First, what accounts for these breakdowns of trust? And, second, is there any hope for rebuilding it? In response to the former, I contend decline in the strength of social institutions and physical communities and the fall in participation in social organizations documented in the work of political scientist Robert Putnam and others comprises an important part of the story of the decline in interpersonal trust. In response to the second, I will argue that social media and the call-out and cancel culture that has evolved there provides a preview of one possible future for moral discourse. My working hypothesis is that while social media facilitates massive social interconnectedness, it does not provide a venue for the kind of low-stakes holdings that generate trust. While actual engagement in our physical communities affords ample opportunities for trust generating interactions, every attempt at holding accountable on social media is a potential public shaming. If this is right, then we might understand the ubiquity of call-outs, draggings, and pilings-on as a kind of communal response to a general lack of recognition of standing to hold accountable.

On the philosophy of humor side, my work focuses on the ethics and epistemology of joking telling. My co-author Steven Gimbel (Gettysburg College) and I have nearly completed our book, In on the Joke: A (Mildly) Contractarian Ethics of Humor, under contract with De Gruyter. We expect publication in 2023. In this work, we present an account of who can tell which jokes when and to which audiences. We demonstrate that the ethics of joking is deeply contextual and that the complexity of the interplay between joke, joker, audience, and context can be modeled in roughly economic terms. Our account of “joke capital” identifies the standing that a joker needs to tell a joke in terms of the properties the joker must exhibit in order to make it likely that their audience will interpret their speech as “just joking.” Jokers pay for jokes with the capital they’ve accrued. The price they pay, on our account, is determined by the likelihood that a particular joke interpreted as bona-fide speech would cause actual harm, the expectations determined by the context of the joke, and particularities of the audience for the joke. Our account, has implications for contemporary discussions of punching-up and punching-down, the ethics of joking in social media, and the controversy over cancel culture.

My other work on joking revolves around the fact that jokes, even as non-bona fide speech, do manage to communicate information, affect attitudes, and prompt reflection. They are not epistemically inert, yet philosophers have largely ignored the question of how jokes can be both playful and efficacious. In presentations on “Joking and Meaning It” and “Joking Around with Truth,” I have begun to sketch an answer to this question that builds on the idea that successful jokes require a familiarity with shared presuppositions thus generating a shared presupposition norm of joking. Jokes serve to bring parts of the conversational common ground into view as things that both the joker and the audience “kina-sorta” believe.