My research interests lie in the mental states most closely tied to evaluation and moral motivation, and their normative upshots.
My early work focused on moral psychology and experimental philosophy. My collaborators and I argued against the theory of an innate moral grammar. Instead, we proposed that moral distinctions—such as doing versus allowing harm—are learned through Bayesian inference. My paper, “Can Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Explain Deontological Moral Judgments?” (published in Cognition), opposes the idea that moral judgment derives from reinforcement learning.
My dissertation explored the nature of evaluative thought, particularly practical judgments about what we or others should do. In my paper “Deciding for Others: An Expressivist Theory of Normative Judgment“ (published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), I defend a new form of expressivism that departs from traditional views, such as Allan Gibbard’s, particularly in its treatment of third-personal ought-judgments. I argue that third-personal normative judgments (e.g., “Mary should go to the store”) are not first-personal plans for counterfactual situations, but rather “decisions for others”—a state that aims to generate an intention in someone else. This view introduces a novel account of third-personal normative judgment and addresses a largely underexplored issue in non-cognitivism concerning the nature of third-personal thought.
The impetus behind this project arose from an interest in whether a certain kind of amoralism—in particular, total disregard for the interests and reasons of others—can be shown to be irrational, given the nature of normative judgment itself. I argue that if my expressivist view of normative judgment is correct, coherence norms on decisions commit us to certain conclusions about what we should do, particularly in relation to promoting or not interfering with others’ rational ends.
In my recent paper, “An Explanation of the Essential Publicity of Practical Reasons” (published in Oxford Studies in Metaethics), I further develop this line of thought. I argue that practical reasons have public force, in the sense that your reason to promote your ends is also a reason for others not to interfere with the promotion of your ends. Moreover, I argue that if my expressivist view is correct, this follows from the nature of normative judgment itself: there is no coherent perspective from which we can reject the normative force of others’ reasons for us. A summary of this paper can be found on the New Work in Philosophy blog.
Currently, I am working on a project about the distinction between two types of desire—attraction and aversion—and their relevance to well-being. Some philosophers deny there is a distinction between being attracted to p and being averse to not-p. My paper “Attraction, Aversion, and Meaning in Life“ (published open-access in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy) defends the reality of this distinction by emphasizing the different roles that attraction and aversion play in the good life. In particular, I argue that attractions, unlike aversions, play a central role in the experience of meaning in life. I plan to develop this line of work into a defense of a general theory of desire.
I also have a project on moral worth in progress. I focus on someone I call a “moral hobbyist”: a person who is intrinsically motivated by morally relevant features, such as helping the poor, but treats morality as if it were a hobby—something they would have no reason to pursue if they weren’t attracted to it. I argue that the hobbyist is not praiseworthy, despite acting directly for the reason that the act is right. What undermines the hobbyist’s praiseworthiness, I contend, is that they fail to act from a certain kind of desire for the right-making feature: “categorical concern”.” The view of moral worth I defend aims to preserve a Kantian insight about moral worth within a broader Arpaly-Markovits framework.
In addition to these projects, I am working on papers on metaphysical grounding, moral non-naturalism, consent, and responsibility and desire.