I keep myself out of trouble by spending my time writing papers and refinishing woodwork (and before corona, by attending and organizing and attending awesome conferences).
Papers You Could Ask Me About (Contact me for available drafts)
Published papers:
Conservative Speech
in Ratio Published online 15 January 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12254
In this paper, I argue that an utterance can function to conserve or maintain the truth of its asserted content, what I call conservative speech. Conservative utterances can work to preserve the truth of their asserted content in two ways. In the first, directive conservatives, the utterance serves as an indirect directive for interlocutors to act in ways that serve to maintain the asserted content. In the second, constitutive conservatives, serve to partly constitute the truth conditions of the asserted content directly. Constitutive conservatives, I argue, are particularly important because they are a central tool for how social groups enforce and thereby maintain facts about group norms and values in the face of deviation. They thus have a central role to play in understanding the role of language in the abilities of social groups to create and maintain their norms and values.
Final Draft Here
Functional Constitutivism’s Misunderstood Resources: A Limited Defense of Smith’s Constitutivism
in Ethics 130(1): 79-91. 2019.
Michael Smith has recently developed an account of categorical normative reasons for action. Smith argues that particular desires are constitutive of ideal agency and draws on his past work on the nature of reasons to establish the normative significance of these desires for all agents. According to a sustained critique by Michael Bukowski, not only is Smith unable to defend several key premises needed to show these desires are constitutive of ideal agency, he is also unable to rely on his previous work to establish the normative significance of such constitutive desires. On the contrary, I argue not only that Smith has these resources, but also that the form of Smith’s constitutivist explanation has unappreciated explanatory strengths.
Final Draft Here
Legal Metanormativity
in Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. eds. Kevin Toh, David Plunkett, Scott Shapiro. (OUP, 2019)
Metaethical constitutivists attempt to explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. This type of normative explanation is increasingly popular for explaining normative features in domains beyond the moral. Scott Shapiro has recently defended a novel form of constitutivist explanation in the philosophy of law which he calls the Planning Theory. On Shapiro’s account, legal systems are social planning systems with a constitutive moral aim that they gain due to the avowals of high-ranking officials. Shapiro then argues that this constitutive moral aim can be used to explain the normativity governing both laws and legal officials. This article develops two objections to Shapiro’s theory. First, I argue that the way Shapiro attempts to establish the moral aim of legal systems is unsuccessful. Second, I argue that, even if this were successful, Shapiro lacks the resources to establish that such an aim could explain the normativity governing legal officials. The conclusion is that Shapiro’s Planning Theory is not a persuasive constitutive explanation of the normativity of law. Despite its shortcomings, I argue that understanding its strengths and working to avoid its weaknesses can help us see the shape of a more promising constitutivist account in the legal domain and also help in developing a more general metanormative constitutivist account.
Final Draft Here
Constitutivism without Normative Thresholds
in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy Vol 12 No 3 (2017)
Constitutivist accounts in metaethics explain the normative standards in a domain by appealing to the constitutive features of its members. The success of these accounts turns on whether they can explain the connection between normative standards and the nature of individuals they authoritatively govern. Many such explanations presuppose that any member of a norm-governed kind must minimally satisfy the norms governing its kind. I call this the Threshold Commitment, and argue that constitutivists should reject it. First, it requires constitutivists to restrict the scope of their explanatory ambitions, because it is not plausibly true of social kinds. Second, despite the frequent reliance on physical artifacts in constitutivists' illustrations of the Threshold Commitment, it counter-intuitively entails that physical artifacts can cease to exist without being physically destroyed. Third, it misconstrues the normative force of authoritative norms on very defective kind-members because it locates this force not in the norm, but in the threat of non-existence. Fortunately, constitutivism can be decoupled from the Threshold Commitment, and I close by sketching a promising alternative account.
Open Access Article Here.
Papers I'd Send You If You Asked Nicely:
Reasons to Believe the Impossible are Possible
Two thirds of the way through his recent Unbelievable Errors (OUP, 2017), Bart Streumer has argued himself into an interesting predicament; he takes himself to have given a sound argument for a conclusion that he cannot bring himself to believe: the truth of a global normative error theory. The final third of the book is devoted to showing that first, Streumer cannot believe it because it is literally impossible to believe it and second, that because it is impossible to believe, we do not have a reason to believe it. I think Streumer has buried the lead: if his arguments are correct, there are sound arguments that do not present reasons for anyone to believe their conclusions. This is a very surprising conclusion, of interest beyond those interested in the error theory. It is also, I argue, false. In this paper I undertake two tasks. First, I show that Streumer's arguments for this conclusion fail: they show neither that the error theory is unbelievable nor that there are no reasons to believe unbelievable propositions. Second, I highlight the role of normativity in distinguishing propositions which cannot be believed from those that cannot be known and draw conclusions for the possibility of epsitemic versions of ought-implies-can arguments.
Draft potentially possible by asking very nicely.
Papers in Draft (May or May Not Be Share-able):
Explaining Constitutivist Normative Explanations
Constitutivist explanations of normativity, especially those which promise to explain practical normativity by appeal to the constitutive features of agency, are often held to be in need of further supplementation by external normative features. So, for example, David Enoch's influential shmagency objection seems to conclude that without providing an externally-supplied reason to be an agent, rather than a shmagent, constitutivists are unable to explain the robust aspects of normative force in the practical domain. I think this is a mistake, and the mistake rests on the presupposition that the distinctive feature of agency that allows it to account for the distinctive normative force in the practical domain must be normative (and thus must be something like being reasons-supported). Such a demand for reasons is often argued by constitutivists to be misguided, question-begging, or even semantially ill-formed, but even if this is true, it is of cold comfort if constitutivists really need such reasons for their account to succeed. Rather than reject the demand, I advocate demonstrating the viability of the constitutivist form of explanation by demonstrating that robust normative force (including rational and motivational force) can be provided by the internal metaphysical resources of a particular, but minimal, constitutivist account of agency. The proof of the pudding is in the eating after all.
Draft unavailable, temporarily. Want a quick look? Download a handout version.
Functions for Constitutivists
Constitutivists about norms have recently tried to appeal to functions to explain the teleological aspect of their account in a naturalistically respectable way. Constitutivist normative explanations vary in the normative explananda, the explanatory strategy, and the constitutive explanans, but they all share this attempt to explain normative features as arising from the constitutive features of some kind. In this paper, I undertake to defend a version of constitutivism appealing to a particular constitutive explanans: etiological proper function. On this constitutivist account, the constitutive feature of a domain that explains its normative features is a historically determined, or etiological, function. Etiologically understood kind-membership, which is the basis for such a constitutive explanation, has often seemed to be a non-starter. In doing so, I explain how etiological proper functions can be constitutive of evaluable kinds, sketch such accounts in the theoretical and practical domains, and argue that such views do a better job accounting for the desiderata for constitutive theories than alternatives.
Draft unavailable, temporarily.
Papers I Love, and Want Excuses to Talk About, but Won't Send You Right Now:
Knowledge as a Normative Kind
Knowledge seems to be the most fundamental normative epistemic kind, but it is famously recalcitrant to analysis. How exactly knowledge could be a normative kind is also a bit of a puzzle. There seem to be three ways that a kind of thing could be normative: First, it might be Norm Governed: it could be a kind whose kind-membership-determining criteria generate the normative standards that authoritatively govern its members. Second, it might be Normatively Virtuous: it could be a kind whose kind-membership-determining criteria selects for the satisfaction of normative standards independently authoritatively governing its members. Finally, it could be Normatively Consequential: it could be a kind whose kind-membership-determining criteria select for properties that enable kind-members to satisfy the normative standards of some non-kind member. I argue that knowledge cannot be either a Norm Governed or a Normatively Virtuous kind, and then consider whether the sense in which knowledge might be Normatively Consequential makes it interestingly normative. I argue that it is, and that this can allow us to make progress in the stalled attempt to provide an analysis of knowledge. If we understand knowledge to be belief that enables its possessor to be a good source of reasons for other social epistemic agents, then this would make knowledge both Normatively Consequential and importantly so.
Want a quick look? Download a handout version.
Why Agency Doesn't Come in Degrees
Agency is often taken to be an ability, and as such, one might think that it can come in degrees: that one could be more or less of an agent. In this paper, I first argue that the uses one might want to put graded agency to are not well-served by the commitment. First, we might want graded agency to allow us to mark a threshold of degree of agency needed for some normatively significant feature, for example, being assessable according to the norms of agency. I argue against such views, which I call `Threshold Views' in [2] and I apply that argument here. Second, we might think understanding graded agency would help us understand or track normative status, such that being more or less of an agent would constitute being a better or worse agent. I argue that this position conflates normative standards and kind-hood in a way that is both implausible for agency and doesn't generalize to other cases. It is implausible that being less of an agent is even prima facie a way to be a worse agent and it is also false that in general being less of something is a way of being worse qua that thing. Finally, I consider the thought that different degrees of agency actually constitute different kinds of agency. This position has two unpalatable consequences. First, it seems to commit graded agency proponents to implausibly holding that decreases or increases in agency constitute discrete changes in kind-hood. Second, on the plausible assumption that normative comparisons of better and worse require shared kind-membership, this position seems to commit graded agency proponents to the view that there are no comparisons between different levels of agency, because they will be governed by distinct norms. I conclude that we should not take agency to be the sort of thing that can be had in degrees.
This paper is temporarily on hiatus.
Knowledge, Justification, and the Role of Inquiry
Virtue epistemology, that takes knowledge to be the result of successful exercise of inference in increasingly popular. But at the same time, there are those who continue to hold that knowledge constitutively requires justification or other normative warrant-conditions. In this paper, I argue that these two positions can only be consistently maintained by endorsing a specific type of account of the proper functioning of inquiry involves producing justification or warrant-conditions. I then demonstrate that holding such a view requires an understanding of epistemic agents as constitutively engaged in public reason-giving which could account for this function of inquiry. I demonstrate that this is an interesting result, both for epistemologists interested in developing accounts of epistemic normativity based on the constitutive features of epistemic kinds like beliefs and inferences as well as for those interested in developing social accounts of epistemology.
This paper is temporarily on hiatus.
Can Epistemic Norms Survive Evolutionary Psychology?
Naturalistic accounts of epistemic norms are sometimes thought to be susceptible to fatal objections from the burgeoning literature on evolutionary psychology. The worry goes: evolutionary psychology tells us that we were selected to have quite sub-standard epistemic systems that none-the-less are evolutionarily beneficial. So we cannot then explain the good-making features of reasoning and mental states by appeal to anything like the good-making features of human inferential processes or minds like ours. We once again can see that the naturalistic fallacy is fallacious after all. I argue that we can see that even in minds like ours with inferential processes evolved to perform tasks in constraints our evolutionary ancestors faced, epistemic norms can be accounted for naturalistically by seeing that the reduction is not to how we have evolved to be reasoners, but that we have evolved to be reasoners. The bulk of this paper involves discussion of the difference between these two ways of naturalistic reduction.
This paper is temporarily on hiatus.
Social Kinds and the Norms They Can't Have
There is a difference between the norms "Slaves ought to be of good stock" and "Ladies ought to cross their legs at the ankle." I argue that the first is, unfortunately, true, while the second is not. I argue that the difference in the two can be accounted for by seeing that the evaluative kind, slave, is a part of our evaluative world, while ladies are a figment of the imagination. Our ability to bring social kinds into the world is real, but limited. This paper addresses a constraint on what sorts of social kinds we can bring into the world by considering the way norms constrain social kinds.
This paper and I are taking a break, but only I am seeing other people.
Papers I've Agreed to Write:
The Aim of Agency for the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Agency
Forthcoming
Conferences I Love (*SOB*)
I was a long time co-organizer of the Saint Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR).
It's great. You should probably come hang out with us in St Louis in May 2020.
You can also sometimes find me at these (and many other) awesome conferences:
The Madison Metaethics Workshop.
The Edinburgh Foundations of Normativity Workshop.
Papers You Could Ask Me About (Contact me for available drafts)
Published papers:
Conservative Speech
in Ratio Published online 15 January 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12254
In this paper, I argue that an utterance can function to conserve or maintain the truth of its asserted content, what I call conservative speech. Conservative utterances can work to preserve the truth of their asserted content in two ways. In the first, directive conservatives, the utterance serves as an indirect directive for interlocutors to act in ways that serve to maintain the asserted content. In the second, constitutive conservatives, serve to partly constitute the truth conditions of the asserted content directly. Constitutive conservatives, I argue, are particularly important because they are a central tool for how social groups enforce and thereby maintain facts about group norms and values in the face of deviation. They thus have a central role to play in understanding the role of language in the abilities of social groups to create and maintain their norms and values.
Final Draft Here
Functional Constitutivism’s Misunderstood Resources: A Limited Defense of Smith’s Constitutivism
in Ethics 130(1): 79-91. 2019.
Michael Smith has recently developed an account of categorical normative reasons for action. Smith argues that particular desires are constitutive of ideal agency and draws on his past work on the nature of reasons to establish the normative significance of these desires for all agents. According to a sustained critique by Michael Bukowski, not only is Smith unable to defend several key premises needed to show these desires are constitutive of ideal agency, he is also unable to rely on his previous work to establish the normative significance of such constitutive desires. On the contrary, I argue not only that Smith has these resources, but also that the form of Smith’s constitutivist explanation has unappreciated explanatory strengths.
Final Draft Here
Legal Metanormativity
in Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. eds. Kevin Toh, David Plunkett, Scott Shapiro. (OUP, 2019)
Metaethical constitutivists attempt to explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. This type of normative explanation is increasingly popular for explaining normative features in domains beyond the moral. Scott Shapiro has recently defended a novel form of constitutivist explanation in the philosophy of law which he calls the Planning Theory. On Shapiro’s account, legal systems are social planning systems with a constitutive moral aim that they gain due to the avowals of high-ranking officials. Shapiro then argues that this constitutive moral aim can be used to explain the normativity governing both laws and legal officials. This article develops two objections to Shapiro’s theory. First, I argue that the way Shapiro attempts to establish the moral aim of legal systems is unsuccessful. Second, I argue that, even if this were successful, Shapiro lacks the resources to establish that such an aim could explain the normativity governing legal officials. The conclusion is that Shapiro’s Planning Theory is not a persuasive constitutive explanation of the normativity of law. Despite its shortcomings, I argue that understanding its strengths and working to avoid its weaknesses can help us see the shape of a more promising constitutivist account in the legal domain and also help in developing a more general metanormative constitutivist account.
Final Draft Here
Constitutivism without Normative Thresholds
in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy Vol 12 No 3 (2017)
Constitutivist accounts in metaethics explain the normative standards in a domain by appealing to the constitutive features of its members. The success of these accounts turns on whether they can explain the connection between normative standards and the nature of individuals they authoritatively govern. Many such explanations presuppose that any member of a norm-governed kind must minimally satisfy the norms governing its kind. I call this the Threshold Commitment, and argue that constitutivists should reject it. First, it requires constitutivists to restrict the scope of their explanatory ambitions, because it is not plausibly true of social kinds. Second, despite the frequent reliance on physical artifacts in constitutivists' illustrations of the Threshold Commitment, it counter-intuitively entails that physical artifacts can cease to exist without being physically destroyed. Third, it misconstrues the normative force of authoritative norms on very defective kind-members because it locates this force not in the norm, but in the threat of non-existence. Fortunately, constitutivism can be decoupled from the Threshold Commitment, and I close by sketching a promising alternative account.
Open Access Article Here.
Papers I'd Send You If You Asked Nicely:
Reasons to Believe the Impossible are Possible
Two thirds of the way through his recent Unbelievable Errors (OUP, 2017), Bart Streumer has argued himself into an interesting predicament; he takes himself to have given a sound argument for a conclusion that he cannot bring himself to believe: the truth of a global normative error theory. The final third of the book is devoted to showing that first, Streumer cannot believe it because it is literally impossible to believe it and second, that because it is impossible to believe, we do not have a reason to believe it. I think Streumer has buried the lead: if his arguments are correct, there are sound arguments that do not present reasons for anyone to believe their conclusions. This is a very surprising conclusion, of interest beyond those interested in the error theory. It is also, I argue, false. In this paper I undertake two tasks. First, I show that Streumer's arguments for this conclusion fail: they show neither that the error theory is unbelievable nor that there are no reasons to believe unbelievable propositions. Second, I highlight the role of normativity in distinguishing propositions which cannot be believed from those that cannot be known and draw conclusions for the possibility of epsitemic versions of ought-implies-can arguments.
Draft potentially possible by asking very nicely.
Papers in Draft (May or May Not Be Share-able):
Explaining Constitutivist Normative Explanations
Constitutivist explanations of normativity, especially those which promise to explain practical normativity by appeal to the constitutive features of agency, are often held to be in need of further supplementation by external normative features. So, for example, David Enoch's influential shmagency objection seems to conclude that without providing an externally-supplied reason to be an agent, rather than a shmagent, constitutivists are unable to explain the robust aspects of normative force in the practical domain. I think this is a mistake, and the mistake rests on the presupposition that the distinctive feature of agency that allows it to account for the distinctive normative force in the practical domain must be normative (and thus must be something like being reasons-supported). Such a demand for reasons is often argued by constitutivists to be misguided, question-begging, or even semantially ill-formed, but even if this is true, it is of cold comfort if constitutivists really need such reasons for their account to succeed. Rather than reject the demand, I advocate demonstrating the viability of the constitutivist form of explanation by demonstrating that robust normative force (including rational and motivational force) can be provided by the internal metaphysical resources of a particular, but minimal, constitutivist account of agency. The proof of the pudding is in the eating after all.
Draft unavailable, temporarily. Want a quick look? Download a handout version.
Functions for Constitutivists
Constitutivists about norms have recently tried to appeal to functions to explain the teleological aspect of their account in a naturalistically respectable way. Constitutivist normative explanations vary in the normative explananda, the explanatory strategy, and the constitutive explanans, but they all share this attempt to explain normative features as arising from the constitutive features of some kind. In this paper, I undertake to defend a version of constitutivism appealing to a particular constitutive explanans: etiological proper function. On this constitutivist account, the constitutive feature of a domain that explains its normative features is a historically determined, or etiological, function. Etiologically understood kind-membership, which is the basis for such a constitutive explanation, has often seemed to be a non-starter. In doing so, I explain how etiological proper functions can be constitutive of evaluable kinds, sketch such accounts in the theoretical and practical domains, and argue that such views do a better job accounting for the desiderata for constitutive theories than alternatives.
Draft unavailable, temporarily.
Papers I Love, and Want Excuses to Talk About, but Won't Send You Right Now:
Knowledge as a Normative Kind
Knowledge seems to be the most fundamental normative epistemic kind, but it is famously recalcitrant to analysis. How exactly knowledge could be a normative kind is also a bit of a puzzle. There seem to be three ways that a kind of thing could be normative: First, it might be Norm Governed: it could be a kind whose kind-membership-determining criteria generate the normative standards that authoritatively govern its members. Second, it might be Normatively Virtuous: it could be a kind whose kind-membership-determining criteria selects for the satisfaction of normative standards independently authoritatively governing its members. Finally, it could be Normatively Consequential: it could be a kind whose kind-membership-determining criteria select for properties that enable kind-members to satisfy the normative standards of some non-kind member. I argue that knowledge cannot be either a Norm Governed or a Normatively Virtuous kind, and then consider whether the sense in which knowledge might be Normatively Consequential makes it interestingly normative. I argue that it is, and that this can allow us to make progress in the stalled attempt to provide an analysis of knowledge. If we understand knowledge to be belief that enables its possessor to be a good source of reasons for other social epistemic agents, then this would make knowledge both Normatively Consequential and importantly so.
Want a quick look? Download a handout version.
Why Agency Doesn't Come in Degrees
Agency is often taken to be an ability, and as such, one might think that it can come in degrees: that one could be more or less of an agent. In this paper, I first argue that the uses one might want to put graded agency to are not well-served by the commitment. First, we might want graded agency to allow us to mark a threshold of degree of agency needed for some normatively significant feature, for example, being assessable according to the norms of agency. I argue against such views, which I call `Threshold Views' in [2] and I apply that argument here. Second, we might think understanding graded agency would help us understand or track normative status, such that being more or less of an agent would constitute being a better or worse agent. I argue that this position conflates normative standards and kind-hood in a way that is both implausible for agency and doesn't generalize to other cases. It is implausible that being less of an agent is even prima facie a way to be a worse agent and it is also false that in general being less of something is a way of being worse qua that thing. Finally, I consider the thought that different degrees of agency actually constitute different kinds of agency. This position has two unpalatable consequences. First, it seems to commit graded agency proponents to implausibly holding that decreases or increases in agency constitute discrete changes in kind-hood. Second, on the plausible assumption that normative comparisons of better and worse require shared kind-membership, this position seems to commit graded agency proponents to the view that there are no comparisons between different levels of agency, because they will be governed by distinct norms. I conclude that we should not take agency to be the sort of thing that can be had in degrees.
This paper is temporarily on hiatus.
Knowledge, Justification, and the Role of Inquiry
Virtue epistemology, that takes knowledge to be the result of successful exercise of inference in increasingly popular. But at the same time, there are those who continue to hold that knowledge constitutively requires justification or other normative warrant-conditions. In this paper, I argue that these two positions can only be consistently maintained by endorsing a specific type of account of the proper functioning of inquiry involves producing justification or warrant-conditions. I then demonstrate that holding such a view requires an understanding of epistemic agents as constitutively engaged in public reason-giving which could account for this function of inquiry. I demonstrate that this is an interesting result, both for epistemologists interested in developing accounts of epistemic normativity based on the constitutive features of epistemic kinds like beliefs and inferences as well as for those interested in developing social accounts of epistemology.
This paper is temporarily on hiatus.
Can Epistemic Norms Survive Evolutionary Psychology?
Naturalistic accounts of epistemic norms are sometimes thought to be susceptible to fatal objections from the burgeoning literature on evolutionary psychology. The worry goes: evolutionary psychology tells us that we were selected to have quite sub-standard epistemic systems that none-the-less are evolutionarily beneficial. So we cannot then explain the good-making features of reasoning and mental states by appeal to anything like the good-making features of human inferential processes or minds like ours. We once again can see that the naturalistic fallacy is fallacious after all. I argue that we can see that even in minds like ours with inferential processes evolved to perform tasks in constraints our evolutionary ancestors faced, epistemic norms can be accounted for naturalistically by seeing that the reduction is not to how we have evolved to be reasoners, but that we have evolved to be reasoners. The bulk of this paper involves discussion of the difference between these two ways of naturalistic reduction.
This paper is temporarily on hiatus.
Social Kinds and the Norms They Can't Have
There is a difference between the norms "Slaves ought to be of good stock" and "Ladies ought to cross their legs at the ankle." I argue that the first is, unfortunately, true, while the second is not. I argue that the difference in the two can be accounted for by seeing that the evaluative kind, slave, is a part of our evaluative world, while ladies are a figment of the imagination. Our ability to bring social kinds into the world is real, but limited. This paper addresses a constraint on what sorts of social kinds we can bring into the world by considering the way norms constrain social kinds.
This paper and I are taking a break, but only I am seeing other people.
Papers I've Agreed to Write:
The Aim of Agency for the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Agency
Forthcoming
Conferences I Love (*SOB*)
I was a long time co-organizer of the Saint Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR).
It's great. You should probably come hang out with us in St Louis in May 2020.
You can also sometimes find me at these (and many other) awesome conferences:
The Madison Metaethics Workshop.
The Edinburgh Foundations of Normativity Workshop.