RESEARCH PROGRAM
​My areas of specialization are metaethics and epistemology. I’m particularly interested in the social origins of normativity. My work explores the requirements of morality and of epistemic rationality to which we hold one another accountable.
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Where do these norms derive their authority? I think that all normativity is fundamentally instrumental in nature. This means that when it comes to explaining normative authority, the buck stops with us - to do what we ought is ultimately a matter of effectively pursuing the ends or goals we have set for ourselves. Yet not all of our reasons are reasons of self-interested practical rationality. On my view, demands of morality and of epistemic rationality arise in connection with the collectively held aims of different sorts of groups of which we are members, like societies or epistemic communities. Through collective endeavors, we obligate one another.
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My most recent work has been focused on articulating and defending a “collective” version of epistemic instrumentalism. In general, this is the view that the demands of epistemic rationality are a special case of the requirements of instrumental (or means-ends) rationality as opposed to a sui generis source of normative demands. Epistemic instrumentalism has been particularly influential in the philosophy of science and among those who wish to offer an account of epistemic normativity that is compatible with a wholly naturalistic worldview. (The alternative view has a lot in common with metaethical moral realism.) In my work, I argue that collective epistemic instrumentalism avoids key objections to traditional versions of the view and offers further advantages when it comes to explaining our standing to hold others epistemically accountable.
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I also have ongoing interests in moral objectivity and relativism, as well as in the epistemology of moral beliefs.
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Latest:
"Epistemic Instrumentalism and the Problem of Epistemic Blame"
in Synthese (2024)
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Abstract: In this paper, I draw attention to the phenomenon of warranted epistemic blame in order to pose a challenge for most forms of epistemic instrumentalism, which is the view that all of the demands of epistemic normativity are requirements of instrumental rationality. Because of the way in which the instrumentalist takes the force of one’s epistemic reasons to derive from one’s own individually held ends, the instrumentalist faces unique difficulties in explaining our standing to blame one another for violations of epistemic norms. In many cases, it is unclear why, according to the instrumentalist, we might be entitled to others’ adherence to epistemic norms at all. This is a serious problem. The upshot is that theorists of epistemic normativity should be prepared reject most forms of epistemic instrumentalism.*
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[*Spoiler: Except for my own, that is! Collective epistemic instrumentalism is uniquely well positioned to explain our standing to direct epistemic blame.]
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FULL LIST OF PUBLICATIONS BY TOPIC
I. Epistemic Normativity: Collective Epistemic Instrumentalism
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- "Could Our Epistemic Reasons Be Collective Practical Reasons?"
(Noûs, 55(4), pp. 842-862, 2021)
I argue that by drawing upon the idea of epistemic communities with investigative goals, we can account for epistemic reasons in an instrumental manner. The resulting view is immune to the main objections to epistemic instrumentalism emphasized by Thomas Kelly (2003), as well as to epistemic analogues of familiar metaethical objections to moral realism.
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- "Epistemic instrumentalism and the problem of epistemic blame"
(Synthese, vol. 204, no. 110, 2024)
I argue that my own collective version of epistemic instrumentalism is uniquely poised to vindicate some of our intuitions about the appropriateness of a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. Traditional forms of epistemic instrumentalism face significant difficulties (in virtue of the defining commitments of the view) explaining how one could have the standing to direct epistemic blame towards others in a common class of cases.
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- I'm contributing a piece on "Epistemic Instrumentalism" to the forthcoming 3rd edition of the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Ed. Kurt Sylvan. (Email for manuscript.)
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II. Moral Normativity: Moral Relativism and Group Agency
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- “Group Agency Meets Metaethics: How to Craft a More Compelling Form of Normative Relativism”
(in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 15, Ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, 2020, Oxford University Press, 219-240)
I show how we can draw upon the claim that societies are agents in their own right in order to formulate a novel version of relativism about moral reasons and reasons of practical rationality. The view avoids key problems faced by well-known version of relativism while still answering to the same metaethical motivations (such as epistemological arguments) that typically attract philosophers to those views.
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- "Relativism" (email for manuscript)
I'm contributing a piece for The Oxford Handbook of Meta-Ethics, Eds. David Copp and Connie Rosati, under contract with Oxford University Press.
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(now online; forthcoming in a special volume of Inquiry on reductionism about group agency, eds. Olof Leffler and Lars Moen)
According to the form of moral relativism that I defend, we can sensibly attribute ends, and thus reasons, directly to societies. This paper provides an independent defense of the claim that we can attribute functional states to societies that play roles analogous to those of ends (motivational states) in individual persons. The paper concludes by reflecting on some broader implications regarding what it is to be an agent and to possess ends. For instance, one need not be consciously aware of one’s ends.
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III. Epistemological Objections to Value Realism
(and Broader Implications for our Understanding of Epistemic Justification)
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- "Bad bootstrapping: the problem with third-factor replies to the Darwinian Dilemma for moral realism"
(Philosophical Studies, 177, pp. 2115-2128, 2020)
I defend Street’s (2006) 'Darwinian Dilemma' for value realism against the third-factor replies popularized by Enoch (2010, 2011), Skarsaune (2011) and Wielenberg (2010, 2014). I argue that these replies are question-begging. I do so by drawing upon the epistemic literature on bootstrapping, which is an intuitively illegitimate form of reasoning.​
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- I'll also be contributing a piece on "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments" to the 3rd edition of the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology. (Email for manuscript.)
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