-Nicomachean Ethics IX.8 1168a13-17
-Critique of Practical Reason (KpV 5: 9n)
I am a visiting residential fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. From 2011-2020, I was an assistant professor of philosophy at Utah State University. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and my B.A. in English and Philosophy through the Schreyer Honors College at Pennsylvania State University.
I am the 2016 recipient of the North American Kant Society’s Wilfrid Sellars Essay Prize for the best essay on Kant’s philosophy by a junior scholar.
I was recognized as the departmental Faculty Undergraduate Advisor of the Year in 2013. During my time teaching at USU, the number of undergraduate philosophy majors increased from about 25 students to nearly 70 students. I was the faculty sponsor of Utah State Society for Women in Philosophy (US-SWIP) to promote a more inclusive environment for and image of philosophical inquiry.
I have teaching and research interests in Ethics, the History of Ethics, Aristotle, Kant, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Action, and Ancient Philosophy.
Email me at erica.a.holberg@gmail.com
I have also worked with five students majoring in philosophy who chose to write a Senior Capstone Thesis with me, which involves intensive one-on-one work over a semester. The student-selected thesis topics include: Locke on property, Anscombe on birth control, Aristotle on temperance, Anscombe and action theory, and Gilligan’s use of gendered moral norms and capacities for feminist purposes.
Finally, I have worked for many years as the coach of USU’s Ethics Bowl teams. Twice our teams did well enough in the Wasatch regional competition in the Fall to advance to the National competition that Spring
“The Importance of Pleasure in the Moral for Kant’s Ethics”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, June 2016, Vol. 54 No. 2, pp. 226-246.
I argue for a new reading of Kant’s claim that respect is the moral incentive; this reading accommodates the central insights of the affectivist and intellectualist readings of respect, while avoiding shortcomings of each. I show that within Kant’s ethical system, the feeling of respect should be understood as paradigmatic of a kind of pleasure, pleasure in the moral. The motivational power of respect arises from its nature as pleasurable feeling, but the feeling does not directly motivate individual dutiful actions. Rather, the feeling is motivational in the sense that, after an agent has acted in a morally good way, the pleasure that results from that action contributes to the cultivation of virtue in the agent and, consequently, morally good actions in the future. Understanding the feeling of respect to be moral pleasure not only gives us insight into how finite rational beings develop virtue, but also a new way of understanding respect as an incentive.
“An Anscombian Approach to Pleasure”, Klēsis Revue Philosophique 35, 2016, pp. 164-179.
Despite her claim that pleasure, as a central concept for the philosophy of psychology, needs its own enquiry before we advance to the even more vexing topic of ethics, Anscombe herself never explicitly took up this challenge. Still, Anscombe defends one central claim about pleasure: pleasure is a reason for action, and more specifically, what Anscombe calls a “desirability characterization”. ‘It’s pleasant’ said of some object characterizes the way in which that object seems good to that agent. Further, pleasure is not just one among many equally important ways something can seem good to the agent: pleasure has a central justificatory role within practical reasoning. From this claim regarding pleasure’s important role within practical reasoning we can begin to answer Anscombe’s call.
“Kant, Oppression, and the Possibility of Non-Culpable Failures to Respect Oneself”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, September 2017, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 285-305.
I argue that Kant’s ethical framework cannot countenance a certain kind of failure to respect oneself that can occur within oppressive social contexts. Kant’s assumption that any person, qua rational being, has guaranteed epistemic access to the moral law as the standard of good action and the capacity to act upon this standard makes autonomy an achievement within the individual agent’s power, but this is contrary to a feminist understanding of autonomy as a relational achievement that can be thwarted by the systematic attack on autonomy that occurs within oppressive social conditions. Insofar as Kant’s negative duty of self-respect is unable to accommodate the ways immersion in oppressive social environments can warp an individual’s understanding of what she is owed and capable of as a moral agent, it perpetuates the cruelty of unjust social systems in the guise of respecting individual autonomy. I conclude by considering Carol Hay’s argument that those who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression, in order to explore how this limitation in how Kant conceives of the duty to respect the self may reach expression in contemporary ethical theory inspired by Kant.
“Kant's Quasi-Eudaimonism”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, September 2018, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 317-341.
In contrast to eudaimonism, Kant argues that moral reasoning and prudential reasoning are two distinct uses of practical reason, each with its own standard for good action. Despite Kant’s commitment to the ineradicable potential for fundamental conflict between these types of practical reasoning, I argue that once we shift to consideration of a developmental narrative of these faculties, we see that virtuous moral reasoning is able to substantively influence prudential reasoning, while prudential reason should be responsive to such influence. Further, Kant indicates the integration of virtue as a commitment concerning practical priorities, and so too what should and should not agree with the agent, is beneficial for prudential reasoning by prudential reasoning’s own standards. Although Kant’s ethical system breaks from eudaimonism in significant ways, it retains the eudaimonist claim that virtuously-informed pursuits of happiness are not only better for virtue, but also better for happiness.
“Gilead vs. the Self”, in The Handmaid's Tale and Philosophy: A Womb of One's Own, Open Court Publishing, Popular Culture and Philosophy series, December 2018, pp. 159-170.
In “Gilead vs. the Self”, I use Kant's conception of our groundedness and development into rational autonomy to consider the ways oppression, here imagined in an extreme authoritarian form, may succeed in attacking the integrity of the self. The Handmaid's Tale shows Gilead's systemic attack on self-respect to occur through deploying two temporalities of oppressive force: oppression as a quick onslaught that radically remakes the ordinary and is achieved through the manipulation of fear, and oppression as a slow grind that consists in having to live with the new ordinary and is achieved through the manipulation of shame. Although Gilead uses our rational dependency on others as a weapon, the self can find the strength to try to resist such attacks through the imaginative invocation of another, loved individual, morally better and stronger than the agent understands herself to be.
“Aristotle on the Pleasure of Courage”, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, June 2019, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp. 289-312.
Aristotle repeatedly qualifies the pleasure of courageous actions relative to other kinds of virtuous actions. This article argues that the pleasure of courageous actions is qualified because virtuous activity and its pleasure is dependent upon external conditions, and the external conditions of courageous actions are particularly constraining. The article shows that Curzer’s explanation of the qualified pleasure of courageous actions by the presence of pain violates Aristotle’s commitment to virtuous actions as being pleasant by their nature.
“Kant as Ethical Naturalist: First and Second Natures in Kant's Ethics”, Philosophical Inquiries, special issue on The Virtues and Practical Reason, Vol. 7, No. 2., pp. 111-130.
I argue that Kant's use, in the critical ethical writings, of our nature as autonomous, rational beings (if imperfectly so) to argue against the normative authority of human nature shows Kant's ethical system to instantiate its own distinctive version of ethical naturalism. The formal structure of Kant's argument fits within ethical naturalism: our nature is what explains how we get onto and are bound by ethical norms. What changes is that Kant rejects the authority of human nature to generate these moral norms by arguing that only rational nature as free and autonomous could sanction this sort of normative grip. In order to show the viability of reading Kant as an ethical naturalist, I address two problems: 1) how to specify a Kantian first nature that is not too human, nor too formal and so empty; 2) how to specify a Kantian second nature as some settled disposition towards willing morally good actions and yet compatible with reason's autonomy.
“Blowing Off Steam: Freud, Smut, and Samantha Bee's Political Comedy”, in Ethics and Comedy, ed. Steven A. Benko, McFarland. (forthcoming)
In “Blowing Off Steam: Freud, Smut, and Samantha Bee's Political Comedy”, I use Freud's description of how political, purposeful jokes work in ways analogous to smut. I then use this theoretical framework to examine how Full Frontal as feminist comedy reconstitutes Freud's gendered triadic structure of joking. For Freud, jokes are like smut in that they allow for the liberation of sexual and hostile impulses through the playful exchange between the joke teller and the joke listener (typically men) and against the object of the joke (a woman or man one desires/wants to belittle). Bee uses an aggressive, sexually explicit, hostile comedic voice to draw attention to hostility towards women in our political moment and to produce comedic pleasure. This paper offers a more sympathetic account of Freud's theory of the comic, while also considering the power and limitations of comedy to advance political ends and not merely conserve the status quo.
Pleasure and the Virtues in Aristotle, under contract with Lexington Books
Pleasure and the Virtues in Aristotle concerns the ways that Aristotle's philosophically rich conception of pleasure is revealed by and informs his description of the virtues. These examples compose Aristotle's response to the problem of how, if pleasure is indeed in natural union with the good, pleasure can also be the primary cause of vice. Consideration of these examples of pleasure in virtuous and vicious actions show pleasure to be a sort of promiscuous, associational thinking that is indispensable to our ability to navigate through the world, but lacks in itself the standards for assessing how well this thinking is proceeding. Chapter 1 will provide an overview of the various philosophical attempts to answer the messy question of the relation between pleasure and action. I show why debates regarding the more explicitly metaphysical claims made about pleasure have proven to be intractable. By bringing resources Aristotle gives us through his descriptions of virtuous actions and friendship to bear upon these interpretive difficulties, we can push our understanding of Aristotle's theory of pleasure forward. Using the example of courage, Chapter 2 sets forth the general structure of pleasure taken in the performance of the character virtues. Chapter 3 uses a puzzle about temperance to explore some ways our pleasures and our appetites, as belonging to appetitive soul, are rational and some ways these are not. In Chapter 4, I use prudence to think through the "impressive realism" of Aristotle's ethics, as expressed in his argument that the good, virtuous person is the measure of what is good and truly pleasant. In Chapter 5, I show how Aristotle's discussion of friendship gives us resources to elaborate how vicious pleasures can be sustained and sustaining, and also how pleasure functions in the development and functioning of the virtues.
“Aristotle on Learning to Enjoy Bodily Pleasures”, under review
This paper shows how temperance narrowly concerns the bodily pleasures, even as it is broadly preservative of phronēsis and the proper pursuit of pleasure in general. A child's earliest instruction in the bodily pleasures, and especially the experience of finding what reason holds forth as good to eat to be pleasant, is crucial for learning to trust reason and its vision of the good, and so for developing temperance and practical wisdom.
“Can We Change Our Pleasures?: A New Look at Kant on Pleasures in the Agreeable”, under review
I argue that agreeable pleasures are open to cultivation because they are both an evaluative response to the world and a motive to action. Our ability to control our actions in pursuit of agreeable pleasures means that, especially over time, our experiences of pleasure in the agreeable may be reflective of rational will.
“Breaking Bad Together: Aristotle on Vicious Pleasures, Sociality, and Coherence”
This paper argues that the primary explanation for how a person first becomes habituated to vicious pleasures is the friendship, or more vaguely, the connectedness to others, found in these vicious pleasures. Despite Aristotle's claim that the “depraved” person is in flight from himself, the vicious person need not feel regret, for there are distinctive ways in which vicious lives hang together, arising from our social training into these vicious pleasures.
“Kant on Mistaking Pleasures”
Starting from the assumption that Kant holds a functional account of pleasure, where the kind of pleasure one is experiencing is primarily identified not from a particular, phenomenological feel, but from what it moves the subject to do, this paper will examine what this means for the possibilities of mistaking the kind of pleasure one is experiencing, and where possible, the normative implications of such mistakes.
“Pleasurable Eating and Aristotle’s Energeia-Kinēsis Distinction”
One vexing metaphysical problem for Aristotle’s account of pleasure is how to explain the taking of pleasure in processes. Aristotle means to improve upon Plato’s conception of pleasure by arguing that pleasure either is activity or supervenes on activity, and that pleasure does not have the metaphysical form of process. However, eating is both one of the most pleasant things we do and a process. I argue Aristotle’s energeia-kinēsis distinction allows for the possibility that an action may be both a process and an activity. In eating a meal, for example, the activity we engage in consists in the exercise of our capacity for self-nourishment, and this activity is normatively dependent upon the process form of what we are doing. The activity is unimpeded or perfected – i.e., it is pleasant – only when we are proceeding well in accordance with the standards given by the process form of the action. The modern assumption that we can cleanly separate what pleasure is from what pleasure is in undermines the realism of Aristotle’s conception of pleasure, and should be avoided in our interpretations of the energeia-kinēsis distinction.
“Pleasure as a Transformative Good and the Three Character Formations of Appetitive Soul in Republic 8 and 9”
I argue that the difference between the pleasures of the philosopher and the pleasures of the oligarch, democratic man, and tyrant, is not simply a difference in the objects enjoyed. Instead, pleasure for Plato functions as a transformative good, meaning that to have good pleasure, you must have a different conception of what pleasure is and how it is good from the bad conceptions of persons ruled by appetite, who view pleasure as (unlimited) consumption.
The Pleasures of Anger: Insights from Aristotle and Kant on Getting Mad, Staying Mad, and Doing This With Others
I am in the early stages of undertaking a monograph on the pleasures of anger. This project begins from the question, 'Why anger?', or more precisely, 'Why do people get angry when they do rather than some other response?'. A person can perceive and fight against injustice without feeling angry, so what does anger accomplish? I will show a crucial part of any satisfactory answer is that anger is in some way pleasant. This idea that anger is tied to pleasure may appear paradoxical from the viewpoint of commonsense psychology, which characterizes experiences of anger, along with other negative affects, as painful. Yet anger can have its pleasures without anger being experienced by the subject as pleasurable overall. Different sorts of pleasures can be identified within the experience of getting angry, but the pleasure of anger in the most fundamental sense is found in how being angry enables the angry person to claim, assert, and begin to restore their lost standing from the perceived injustice.
While this analysis proceeds from the individual's experience of anger, the focus of the book is on how anger can be something that a group of people do together. Pleasure is necessary for explaining how the character of the anger itself is changed when anger is done by an individual or done as a group. At the individual level, pleasure is key for explaining not just why anger is preferable to other sorts of feelings in response to the intentional object of the anger, but also why someone may want to stay with their anger, or even return to some anger after setting it aside. This possibility — that feeling angry can be not only an immediate emotional response to a perceived injustice, but a kind of activity that can be voluntarily taken up and also put aside — can be glimpsed within some individual experiences of anger, but anger as an activity is fundamentally something people do together, with individuals entering into and tabling some socially-shared anger at their convenience. Certain features are distinctive of the activity of anger as done by more than one person. The object of the group anger will be more diffuse, as this is necessary for different persons to partake in feeling angry towards it. Group anger will be less easy to resolve, since there is not usually a clear, unitary account of the wrong suffered and the appropriate remedy for this wrong. In general, group anger will be less practical in its orientation than individual anger: in some vital way, the point or goal of individual anger is to secure redress for the wrong suffered, including revenge upon the wrongdoer, whereas the point or goal of group anger is primarily the feeling of anger itself. In being done primarily for the feeling itself and so for its own sake, group anger is even more self-sustaining than individual anger. Moreover, in being done simply for the experience of doing/feeling it, and so becoming something like an end-in-itself, group anger becomes in its formal structure more like pleasure.
I have organized eight symposia the past few years to encourage philosophical community. The topics have been: Star Wars Symposium, Zombie Zymposium, “How to Think Philosophically when Politics Goes Crazy” Symposium, Superhero Symposium, Comedy and Philosophy Symposium, Are Students Snowflakes? Symposium, Meaning and #MeToo, and Politically Irrational Animals. The format is for each of the three panelists to speak for about 10 minutes each, and then discussion for about an hour of the issues raised.
I am the faculty sponsor for this group. We have a dinner every semester for women philosophy majors or minors and women philosophy faculty to get together and discuss a reading and other issues. The students also organize and run an event each semester for anyone interested in participating. The students have held one event on political and social uses of shame, and a Valentine’s Day event on love.
Recently we have started to offer a new kind of event. Over the course of three weeks, we show three movies selected for the philosophical conversation these movies together would support. On the fourth week, we hold a discussion about these three movies that is structured like the philosophy symposium, with faculty speaking for about thirty minutes and open discussion afterwards.
For two of the symposia I organized, the panelists were invited to participate in a discussion on Access Utah, a morning show on Utah Public Radio.
“I just wanted to thank you for your instruction this semester! It was my first and only semester taking so many Philosophy classes, and I wish I could have taken more before I graduated! Anyways, I really appreciated the classes you taught and how you taught them. I learned a lot and grew an even stronger appreciation for reading, learning, and the new ways of thinking about different issues in the world. Thank you so much and I wish you well in future classes you teach!”
“I just finished Plato’s The Republic, and I remembered you saying that in the tenth book it discusses poetry. He says that the poet is the second imitator of the form. For God makes Table and a craftsman makes a table but the poet discusses the table. He warns that the poet must be stripped of his colorful rhetoric to see the truth in his statements.
I thought this was related to our talk on Beyonce and how her art turns into activism or her art is activism. It was nice to hear Plato’s opinion on this. As well, I just thought I’d let you know that your class has provided with more thought in my other readings. Thank you for that. ”
“I hope finals week is going well for you! I came across this video and it made me think of the Theories of Sex and Gender class. I don’t know if you have already seen it, but if not, it would have been a decent show-and-tell. Thank you for this semester! ”
“I hope all is going well with classes, research, and ethics bowl. Thought I’d share a relevant thoughtpiece”
“I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful class this last semester. I feel that I have learned to think for myself in politics and to form educated opinions. I have learned to try to understand both sides of an issue, which is very important, and have come to understand that there is not always a clear cut answer. I am so grateful for the papers and the writing workshops, as I feel that also helped me study the topics more in depth, which allowed me to understand more of the concept. I loved your class, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to take it. Thank you. ”
“I’m a former student, but I was just watching The Good Place on Netflix (you should check it out) and the ethics discussions on the show reminded me of you. I just wanted you to know that even though I wasn’t the best student, you made an impact on me, and I really appreciate the effort you put into your ethics class.”
