My research is in metaethics and moral psychology. I am especially interested in the mental states most closely tied to evaluation and moral motivation, and in one question about them in particular: what is it for a subject to be moved by something as a reason? We grant some considerations authority in deliberation; we treat them as counting in favor of a response regardless of whether we are inclined to respond that way, so that failing to respond that way counts as a mistake. My work seeks to understand how this kind of normative force is manifested in experience and motivation, what distinguishes genuine rational responsiveness from merely causal or accidental conformity to normativity, and whether we can explain these phenomena without understanding normative thought as the detection of normative properties in the world, or whether only a kind of realism about normativity can make sense of them.
Much of my recent work approaches these questions through the topic of moral worth. On standard views, an act has moral worth when the agent is moved by the right considerations. In “Moral Worth beyond Right Reasons” (Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 21), I describe a “moral hobbyist,” who is moved by exactly the right considerations but only because they appeal to her. She is not praiseworthy, and no view that looks only at the content of her motivation can explain why. I argue that what she lacks is an appropriate stance toward her reasons: moral worth requires that the agent take the needs of others as reasons whatever she happens to want—she must respond to them as categorical reasons. On my diagnosis, views that require acting from a de dicto desire “to do what is right” locate the relevant difference in the content of the agent’s motivation when it properly belongs in her stance toward her reasons.
In “The Worth of Moral Worth” (forthcoming in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society), I ask why acting with moral worth is valuable in the first place. I argue that when an agent acts with moral worth, she realizes a distinctive kind of teleological explanation: the goodness of what she brings about helps explain why it comes about, because she appreciates that goodness as a reason for action. I argue that this explanatory relation has value independently of the value of the act’s effects. Moral worth is therefore valuable because through the morally worthy actions of agents, value itself comes to govern what happens through its significance. The conditions of moral worth are simply the conditions under which this particular kind of teleological explanation is realized via the agent’s will.
A second line of work concerns emotion and desire. Here I ask how evaluative considerations exert a distinctive kind of psychological pressure even prior to reflective judgment. In “Why Emotion Tempts Belief” (provisionally forthcoming in Philosophical Studies), I begin from an asymmetry between perceptual illusion and recalcitrant emotion. Once I learn that the Müller-Lyer lines are equal, their misleading appearance need not continue to tempt me to believe that they are different. But when I continue to feel afraid despite being convinced that there is no danger, the affect continues to tempt me toward the contrary verdict; it cannot be “bracketed” as an appearance can. I argue that this asymmetry is best explained by the hypothesis that affect constitutively involves a pre-reflective taking of considerations as reasons: an active orientation toward an evaluative verdict that falls short of judgment, and is more than a presentation of evaluative content, as the perceptualist view of emotion assumes. The view explains both why affect is essentially doxastically tempting and why we can be answerable for our emotions in a way that we are not answerable for our perceptual experiences.
Relatedly, in “Responsibility for Desire” (forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Desire), I argue that even desires we repudiate are attributable to us in a minimal sense because they form part of the agent’s, perhaps pre-reflective, evaluative take on the world. Existing theories of desire have difficulty capturing the precise sense in which even unwelcome desires can nevertheless speak for us. “Attraction, Aversion, and Meaning in Life” (Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy) focuses on a further structural feature of desire. Against views that deny a significant distinction between being attracted to p and being averse to not-p, I argue that attraction and aversion make importantly different contributions to well-being: attractions, unlike aversions, play a central role in the experience of meaning in life.
These claims about affect and motivation also bear on the nature of normative judgment. If the normative element in our mental lives can consist in a way of taking considerations rather than in a normative content represented as true, then normative judgment need not fundamentally be belief in normative facts. “Deciding for Others” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) develops an expressivist view on which judging that someone ought to act is a way of deciding for them. “An Explanation of the Essential Publicity of Practical Reasons” (Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 19) argues that this view explains why anyone who judges that you have a reason to act is committed to regarding it as a reason for others not to interfere. One consequence is that rational egoism, at least in its standard formulation, is incoherent (see also “Noncognitivism and Agent-Centered Norms,” with Gideon Rosen, Philosophical Studies). “Requiring Reasons as Reasons to Feel Compelled” (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies) extends this approach to normative weight. I argue that the difference between reasons that require and reasons that merely commend or permit need not be understood as a difference in a mysterious further dimension of normative force; it can instead be understood in terms of the different attitudes for which those reasons provide right-kind support.
A related strand of my work concerns responsibility and failures of rational responsiveness. “Blaming for Unreasonableness: Accountability without Ill Will” (Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy) argues that ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. When an agent acts wrongly from factual ignorance, I argue, she is blameworthy if and only if her ignorance results from a failure to exercise a rational capacity. The paper thus locates responsibility not simply in what motivates an agent, but in whether she exercises the capacities required to respond appropriately to the reasons available to her.
My early work was primarily in moral psychology and experimental philosophy. With collaborators, I argued against the hypothesis of an innate moral grammar and proposed instead that moral distinctions such as doing versus allowing harm can be learned through Bayesian inference. “Can Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Explain Deontological Moral Judgments?” (Cognition) raises three problems for the proposal that deontological moral judgments derive from model-free reinforcement learning. This empirical work reflects a concern that continues to animate my more recent research: explaining evaluative thought and motivation in terms of psychologically intelligible processes.