Research

My research is in moral psychology. I write on the topics of trust, promises, character, self-deception, and rationalization.  I have also done work in bioethics (in particular, trust and consent) and the philosophy of art (in particular, fiction-directed emotion, imaginative resistance, and the autographic/allographic distiction).

Regarding trust, promises, and character, I am interested in such questions as: What sorts of considerations underwrite rational trust in others?  What capacities must one believe that one has in order to make sincere promises and to responsibly invite the trust of others?  What does it mean to trust well, and what are the moral stakes of distrust?

Regarding self-deception and rationalization, I am interested in such questions as: What is rationalization, and how does it differ from motivationally biased belief formation?  Can rationalization be understood as a kind of performative pretense?  Is it possible to pretend without knowing it?

Papers on Trust, Promising, and Character

Humble Trust Philosophical Studies 176 (4):933-953 |pdf | citable

I challenge the common view that trust is characteristically risky compared to distrust by drawing attention to the moral and epistemic risks of distrust. Distrust that is based in real fear yet fails to target ill will, lack of integrity, or incompetence, serves to marginalize and exclude individuals who have done nothing that would justify their marginalization or exclusion. I begin with a characterization of the suite of behaviors characteristic of trust of distrust. I then survey the epistemic and moral hazards of distrust, in particular, distrust’s propensity to bias interpretation, to perpetuate itself, to confirm itself, to dishonor, and to insult. Taking seriously these moral and epistemic hazards requires taking affirmative measures to respond to them. I elaborate one such response: “humble trust”. The practice of humble trust issues from skepticism about the warrant of one’s own felt attitudes of trust and distrust, curiosity about who might be unexpectedly responsive to trust and in which contexts, and commitment to abjure and to avoid distrust of the trustworthy. Humble trust enables individuals to trust that they will be trusted.

Trust, Trustworthiness, and the Moral Consequence of Consistency  Journal of the American Philosophical Association vol. 1:3 pp. 467-484| pdf | citable

Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include a belief in a capacity for robust dispositions).

Promising to Try (with Justin Kalef) Ethics Vol. 125, No. 3 (April 2015), pp. 797-806| pdf | citable

We maintain that in many contexts promising to try is expressive of responsibility as a promiser. This morally significant application of promising to try speaks in favor of the view that responsible promisers favor evidentialism about promises. Contra Marušić, we contend that responsible promisers typically withdraw from promising to act, and instead promise to try, in circumstances where they recognize that there is a significant chance that they will not succeed.

Promises and Consistency (with Rachel Cohon) forthcoming in Character: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford, ed. Iskra Fileva)

Situationists in moral philosophy infer from empirical studies in social psychology that human beings lack cross-situational behavioral consistency: that is, for the most part, we human beings are not able to act in the same trait-relevant way across a range of distinct types of situations, because those situational differences trigger differences in behavior. In this paper we defend the following thesis: one who accepts this conclusion (that is, one who judges that human beings in general are not possessed of behavioral consistency) cannot make a promise in good faith. This has important consequences for the ethical institution of promising and its associated reactive attitudes.

Distrust (contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy) | pdf

There is still much work to be done in characterizing and taxonomizing distrust perspicuously, as well as in specifying the analytical connections between trust and distrust. In what follows I describe what I take to be the state of art and I lay out some of the challenges ahead. I also address tensions between moral and epistemic norms of distrust, and I consider what the appropriate response to unwarranted distrust might be.

Papers on Deliberation, Rationalization, and Self-Deception

Unwitting Pretense and the Self-Deceptive Mind draft in progress | pdf

What might it mean to pretend unwittingly? I propose an answer to this question by first offering an account of the mental structures and metacognitive capacities required for imaginative pretense. I then provide an illustration of the irrationality symptomatic of the breakdown of these structures and the diminution of these capacities. The resultant state of mind I dub “unwitting pretense”. In the second half of the paper I deploy the concept of “unwitting pretense” to give an account of the incongruous behavioral tendencies of subjects are who self-deceived. I argue that characterizing self-deceivers as unwitting pretenders allows us to make sense of their tendencies to avoid evidence, to subvert their own aims, and to emerge from self-deception in response to altered incentives.

Rationalization, Evidence, and Pretense forthcoming in Ratio | pdf | citable

I distinguish the category of “rationalization” from various forms of epistemic irrationality. I maintain that only if we model rationalizers as pretenders can we make sense of the rationalizer’s distinctive relationship to the evidence in her posses- sion. I contrast the cognitive attitude of the rationalizer with that of believers whose relationship to the evidence I describe as “waffling” or “intransigent”. In the final section of the paper, I compare the rationalizer to the Frankfurtian bullshitter.

Rationalization as Performative Pretense  forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology | pdf | citable

Rationalization in the sense of self-justification is a phenomenon very familiar to us all. It’s not cheating because everyone else is doing it too. I didn’t report the abuse because it wasn’t my place. I understated my income this year because I paid too much in tax last year. I’m only a social smoker, so I won’t get cancer.The mental mechanisms subserving rationalization have been studied closely by psychologists. However, when viewed against the backdrop of philosophical accounts of the regulative role of truth in doxastic deliberation (deliberation about what to believe), rationalization can look very puzzling. Almost all contemporary philosophers endorse a version of the thesis of deliberative exclusivity: a thinker cannot in full consciousness decide whether to believe that p in a way that issues directly in forming a belief by adducing anything other than considerations that she regards as relevant to the truth of p. But, as I argue, rationalization involves the weighing of considerations that the thinker knows very well are truth-irrelevant or inconclusive. This paper reconciles rationalization with deliberative exclusivity by modeling rationalization as a kind of performative pretense.

Volatile Reasons Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1):31 – 40 (2013) | pdf | citable

I argue for the existence of a category of practical reasons which I call ‘Deliberation-Volatile Reasons’ or ‘DVRs’. DVRs have the distinguishing feature that their status as reasons for action is diminished when they are weighed in deliberation by the agent. I argue that DVRs are evidence of ‘deliberative blind spots’. I submit that an agent manifests a peculiar kind of practical irrationality in so far as she endeavours to find a deliberative path to what she has reason to do, when the discovery of such a path renders the destination inaccessible.  Michael Brownstein further develops these (and other) ideas to characterize hyperopic decision-making.

Papers in the Philosophy of Art

Are Digital Images Allographic? (with P.D. Magnus)  The Journal of Aesthetics and Art CriticismVolume 72, Issue 4, pages 417–427, Fall 2014| pdf | citable

Nelson Goodman’s distinction between  autographic and allographic arts is appealing, we suggest, because it promises to resolve several prima facie puzzles. We consider and rebut a recent argument which alleges that digital images explode the autographic/allographic distinction. Regardless, there is another familiar problem with the distinction, especially as Goodman formulates it: It seems to entirely ignore an important sense in which all art works are historical. We note in reply that some art works can be considered both as historical products and as a formal structures. Talk about such works is ambiguous between the two aspects. This allows us to recover Goodman’s distinction: Art forms which are ambiguous in this way are allographic. With that formulation settled, we argue that digital images are allographic. We conclude by considering the objection that digital photographs, unlike other digital images, would count as autographic by our criterion; we reply that this points to the vexed nature of photography rather than any problem with the distinction.

Preserving the Autographic/Allographic Distinction (with P.D. Magnus) forthcoming in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism | pdf

We reply to objections from John Zeimbekis that our account of the autographic/allographic distinction collapses. We maintain that while Zeimbekis’s arguments do challenge an element of Goodman’s own theory of notation that derives from his requirement of recoverability, Goodman’s requirement can be abandoned without losing the explanatory power of the autographic/allographic distinction as we have refined it.

Agency and Volition in Make-Believe Worlds forthcoming in How to Make Believe (DeGruyter) | pdf

I examine considerations adduced by philosopher J. David Velleman in favor of the view that Second Life Residents exercise real agency while animating their virtual bodies. I then argue that important disanalogies between Second Life and real life should give us pause in attributing full-blooded personhood, and therefore full-blooded agency, to Second Life Residents. In particular, I argue that Residents are less inclined to have volitions, desires about the content of their will, in the sense articulated by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt. I argue that structural features of Second Life make individuals less inclined to care about their Second Life avatars in the same way that they care about their real lives. Finally, I point out ways that the analysis of agency in Second Life illuminates aspects of agency in the real world.