Research
One way or another, most of my work attends to the particular ethical dimensions of close personal relationships while acknowledging how these are impacted by, and play a role in, sweeping systems of oppression. I've spent time thinking about how discussions of forgiveness, moral development, love, agency, and care can grapple with this. One sort of relationship that continues to interest me is the one between a testifier and her audience, so my research sometimes intersects with social epistemology.
Published work
"In Defense of Genuine Un-Forgiving", Philosophical Studies (2024)
Lots of people think forgiveness is permanent and that there are no take-backs. This means we either can't or shouldn't "un-forgive." I argue that we can un-forgive and that it can sometimes be permissible; un-forgiving enables an ideal of forgiveness wherein victims hold wrongdoers accountable for their moral development and allows certain opportunities for relational repair. [View-only PDF here; pre-pub draft here.]
You can find a brief summary of the paper, written for the New Work in Philosophy Substack, here.
Work in progress & under review
A paper on aesthetically critiquing manifestations of oppression
We typically respond to morally offensive manifestations of oppression with moral critique. But sometimes we find ourselves aesethetically critiquing these things, describing them as uncreative, clumsy, ugly, ridiculous, unsubtle, gross, or downright boring. I examine how these critiques allow us to recover agency in response to agency-restricting double binds. Happy to share a draft via email.
A paper on love and fairness
Some people think a concern with justice or fairness is at odds with the lovingness of a romantic partnership. Against this idea, I argue that love and fairness are unified in the sense that certain acts of loving - acts through which partners "share a life"- are properly evaluable by standards of fairness. Happy to share a draft via email.
A paper on dependency and need
We depend on one another for survival, flourishing, and for the mundane forms of assistance that allow us to move through our days. Understanding these “webs of social interconnection” is an essential part of the care ethical project. Thus far, care theorists have understood the relevant notion of dependency in terms of needs. To depend on someone, on this common view, is to stand in a need-meeting relation with them. In this paper I argue for the surprising conclusion that the dependency is not a matter of need-meeting. Happy to share a draft via email.
Depending on Others
I argue for understanding interpersonal dependency as an expectation-meeting relationship and respond to an apparent objection: namely, that the account fails to capture the dependency of newborn infants who don't appear to expect things of others. Here is a draft.
How does oppression twist our agency?
Feminists are concerned with the unjust distribution of material and epistemic resources. More intriguingly, many theorists claim that oppressive systems unjustly distribute the capacity to act. I precisify the mechanisms through which this "agential injustice" can occur. Here is a draft.
Rethinking Dependence and Care
Feminist care ethicists seek to characterize the unique value of entering and sustaining caring relationships. Meanwhile, a persistent strain within disability activism rejects care as undesirable and even insulting, sometimes advocating “independent living” instead. I argue that resolving this dispute requires abandoning Care Monism, the idea that all ideal dependency relations are caring. Happy to share a draft via email.
Papers in earlier stages of progress
A paper on testimony and aretaic epistemic evaluation
I argue that believing on someone's say-so involves believing them on a particular kind of evidence, and that this has implications for the nature of epistemic evaluation.
A paper on authority, inquiry, and gender avowals
I solve a puzzle about the right way to respond to gender avowals (statements like "I am a woman") in the context of close, personal relationships.
A paper on dependency and disability access
A paper on "invisible dependence"
My dissertation is about interpersonal dependence, the sort of relation at issue when we say things like "I'm depending on you." These relationships are important, pervasive, and under-theorized. Our most valuable relationships (including loving and caring relations) involve numerous (inter)dependencies.
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In chapters on dependence itself, love, and care, I offer interventions in the way philosophers have understood and evaluated these relationships.
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Dissertation
Rethinking Interpersonal Dependence
In Chapter 1, I argue that previous accounts of interpersonal dependence, which treat dependence as a need-meeting relationship, cannot meet desiderata extracted from care theoretical thought.
In Chapter 2, I defend my alternative account of dependence as an expectation-meeting relation. This is the sort of relation that obtains between people, I argue, when someone normatively expects work of another person, and when that second person countenances those expectations.
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In Chapter 3, I develop an account of love that directly builds in fair distribution of benefits and burdens (including dependency work).
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In Chapter 4, I defend the idealized dependency relation of help as an important guiding ideal for many disabled folks and their personal assistants who reject the appropriateness of care.
I discuss some of the ideas from the dissertation in this blog post: "What Does It Mean To Depend On Someone?" (Blog of the APA, Women in Philosophy series)