Publications

“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.