Research Interests (for papers under review or published, abstracts are provided below):
I. Environmental Philosophy: Environmental Ethics, Value Pluralism, and Environmental Deliberation.
II. Ethical Theory: The Viability of Indirect Consequentialism and the Normative Requirements of Group Membership.
III. Social Philosophy: Collective Constitution, Collective Action, and Collective Responsibility
IV. Odds and Ends: The Dalai Lama and Educating for Virtue, Quine and ethics
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My general research interests in environmental philosophy involve the nature of environmental values and the way in which characteristic features of those values are related to the policies they inform and the systemic environmental conditions that enable them. I take there to be important lessons to be learned from the interdependence of preconditions of value, the values themselves, and derivative policies. The pressures of individual valuers, the pressures of the body politic, and the pressures presented by the processes of the environment itself may often push in different directions. Navigating these difficult waters requires taking seriously the problems of aggregation and the pressures of publicity, acknowledging the dynamic nature of natural processes and our unavoidable reliance on fallible ecological science, and attempting to understand the relevant sorts of values at issue. By examining the intersection of these different sorts of pressures, I hope to make some headway in understanding each of these elements. I believe that one cannot provide an adequate account of environmental values without considering both the normative significance of the background conditions, generally systemic in nature, that enable those values, and the way in which those values might be publicly expressed.
My present project in environmental philosophy focuses on how the way in which environmental values are expressed by individual deliberators restricts the range of viable environmental policy. I claim that individual valuers, when engaged in deliberation about some contentious matter of environmental policy, will generally presuppose (1) that there is a feature being evaluated that is worth being concerned with and which focuses any debate about what has value (call this a form of naturalism), and (2) that it is possible they might be wrong in their judgments (call this a limited form of fallibilism). Moreover, if we consider the justifications that might be provided for a range of disparate positions, there may well be more common ground than is usually admitted. The presuppositions of deliberators, I will argue, pressure policy both to conform to a certain model of diachronic coherence (such that the institutions generating such policy demonstrate Dworkin-styled integrity) and to be responsive to the dynamic processes of whatever is being valued.
I take these features of to help answer a central question of environmental policy: To what should environmental policy and policy makers be sensitive? Just as in the case of individual deliberators, the obvious, but not particularly helpful answer to this question is, some problematic feature of human-environment interaction. More specifically, the problem motivating the formation of policy is certainly something to which the policy must be sensitive: better policies more successfully resolve the problem motivating that policy. But that is too simple: the resolution of the problem motivating policy also requires sensitivity to the polity, that group of individuals subject to the policy, the stakeholders. The less a policy is sensitive to the particular interests and needs of individuals subject to that policy the less that policy has a chance of being viable in the long term. And there is a third, complicating factor. Policies should also be sensitive to the pressures of precedent. But the pressures of precedent move policy not toward an intractable conservativism, but toward some form of diachronic coherence, some recognition that if the policy is to have some chance of being successful in the long term, there must be some expectation that, barring some clear reason (e.g., dramatic failure of some a policy in either being responsive to the policy or in accomplishing its goals with respect to the problem it was designed to address), policy will not be radically altered. We should form environmental policy with the explicit intent of that policy shaping further policy such that those subject to that policy can moderate their behaviors accordingly.
By examining the discursive interaction of individual deliberators, focused on resolving whatever problem has motivated their deliberation (rather than some dogmatic ideology), we can see the importance of developing policy that is responsive to the pressures of the motivating problem, the policy of individual deliberators, and the precedent of previous policy. While I doubt very much that a uniform method of addressing these competing pressures might be developed, we can develop some useful heuristics which will tell us as much about the nature of environmental values as they do about viable environmental policy.
I have written papers on value pluralism, integrity in environmental deliberation and policy, the nature of environmental value presupposed by this project, and the way in which the conformity of environmental policy to integrity is related to Bryan Norton’s convergence thesis (without relying on his pragmatic metaphysics).
1. Centering Value Pluralism in Environmental Ethics: Weston’s Multiverse, Nagel’s Pluralism, Wenz’s Distinction, and Norton’s Thesis (Southwestern Philosophical Review 21.1 (2005): 93-101)
ABS: Recently Anthony Weston proposed “multicentrism” as a new framework for environmental ethics. I argue that there are similarities between Weston’s multicentrism and the pluralism advanced by Thomas Nagel in “The Fragmentation of Value.” While Weston’s position seems remarkably divorced from stereotypically human values, and thereby divorced from the sort of considerations with which Nagel is concerned, once we explicate “centrism” Weston’s position relies on the human point of view in a manner that is both reasonable and in line with Nagel’s position. I conclude that if the multicentrist position advocated by Weston is to be developed into a practicable ethic it will have to maintain its grip on a weak form of anthropocentrism.
2. Environmental Policy with Integrity (forthcoming, Environmental Values)
ABS: In response to what has been called the discursive dilemma, Christian List has argued that the nature of the public agenda facing deliberative bodies indicates the appropriate form of decision procedure or deliberative process. In this paper I consider the particular case of environmental policy where, I claim, we are faced with pressures not only from deliberators and stakeholders, but also from the environment itself. As a consequence of this dilemma I argue that insofar as the focus of a policy forming body is on the formation of viable environmental policy, rather than on a set of preexistent ideological commitments, deliberative agents should be responsive as a unified body to the pressures of precedent, the best available science, and their own best individual judgments. In the case of environmental policy the dilemma pressures deliberative bodies to display what Ronald Dworkin has called integrity even in cases where this requires those deliberative bodies to sacrifice being maximally responsive to the preferences of individual deliberators.
3. Pragmatic Value of Intrinsic Value (Preliminary version presented in Pasadena at 2008 Pacific Meetings of the APA)
ABS: It has recently been argued that, claims of certain environmental pragmatists to the contrary, we should not give up on intrinsic value. Intrinsic value helps us to respond differentially to that which is differently valuable. In this paper I claim while this is largely correct, there is a particularly pragmatic value to intrinsic value. The value of intrinsic value, properly characterized, comes not only from its role in public debate and policy formation, as environmental pragmatists rightly note, but also from the role it plays in the deliberations of individual valuers. This role goes beyond distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic value. I argue that when a deliberator attributes intrinsic value they deliberate as if that which is valued has features that warrant intrinsic value, and as if they could be fallible both in recognizing features that warrant value and in properly responding to those features. I claim the best support for acknowledging intrinsic value comes from pragmatic considerations. We can thereby draw together the conclusions of environmental pragmatists and those more critical of the pragmatic tradition.
4. “Reasonable Environmental Policy: Integrity, Pluralism, and Convergence” (Preliminary version delivered in January and February, 2008, to audiences at Georgetown University and the University of Georgia)
ABS: In this paper I argue that the drive toward Dworkin-styled integrity on the part of deliberative policy-making bodies provides evidence for an expanded version of Bryan Norton’s Convergence Hypothesis. If we expand the convergence hypothesis to cover not merely the bipolar contrast between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric values, but a wider range of sources of values we can find additional evidence in its favor. More specifically, satisfying a set of conditions required for deliberative bodies to display integrity (within a limited range of contexts) will also entail that, over time, the various members of such a deliberative body will converge onto collective decisions regarding matters of policy. Specifically, if deliberative bodies operate within the framework of a plausible and limited form of value pluralism (such that their individual members’ values need not be subsumed under a single metric), satisfy a requirement that their collective deliberations be responsive to the values of individual deliberators (what I call a publicity constraint), and satisfy a minimal demand that the deliberative body be responsive to features of the environment rather than their own dogmatic ideologies (what I call a commitment to naturalism), then the policies generated by those deliberative bodies will tend to be in accordance with the expanded convergence hypothesis. And, I argue, they will do so to the degree they display integrity. This provides support for precisely the sort of convergence Bryan Norton advocates; and it does so without relying on the metaphysical and conceptual presuppositions of Norton’s pragmatism. Given the political reality of pluralism, I conclude that pressures toward integrity provide pressures for convergence.
5. Environmental Ethics (encyclopedia entry) (Jiyuan Yu, ed. Frontiers in Western Philosophy, Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2008) 14000 words.
This entry will be published in Chinese (translator TBA); the English version can be found here.
6. Adaptive Management and Institutional Agency: Adaptability, Stability, and Accountability (to be presented at Clemson University, 7 Sep 2008, as part of "Human flourishing and restoration in the age of global warming")
As our environment becomes increasingly volatile, our capacity to adapt to that changing environment is increasingly tested. When adaptation involves management, the challenges posed by these changes become daunting. After all, adaptive management requires that we be variably responsive to the environment, and that the best way to do this, one might think, is to design environmental institutions and monitoring agencies accordingly. Of course there are other approaches to environmental problems, market based approaches and democratic deliberative approaches have been, and should continued to be considered. But institutional approaches are common, and, prima facie, seem to be appropriate for adaptive management. Institutional responses to problems of adaptive management require, most simply, that institutions be designed such that they are capable of adapting to changing conditions. In an era of massive environmental change the need to develop such institutions is increasingly pressing. But there are structural problems in developing institutions capable of being flexible enough to be responsive to a changing environment and also stable enough to survive perturbations in that environment. Moreover, these fairly obvious tensions are compounded by another pressure: the need for some means of evaluating how well an institution has fulfilled the purpose for which it was designed. These three pressures, adaptability, stability, and accountability are difficult to satisfy simultaneously. One way these three conditions might be satisfied simultaneously would be to compel agency on the relevant institutions. Just as individual agents satisfy these conditions, at least ideally, then so too might collective agents. However, I argue that this route is highly problematic, both in terms of the functional and structural requirements for institutional agency and in terms of the purposes for which institutions of adaptive management are appropriately designed. An institution that satisfies the requirements of collective agency, and is in that way able to adapt to evolving features of the problematic it was designed to address, would be decreasingly capable of being responsive to those individuals that enable its collective agency. After all, without the individuals constituting an institutional, collective agent, there is no agent. Without the polity, there is no polis. The more an institution is appropriately object-focused, that is, the more it is responsive to the features of the environment it was designed (or had been allowed to develop) to address, the more it is incapable of being responsive to the polity. The more it is capable of truly adapting to its environment, the less it is susceptible to pressures of civic engagement. It seems exceedingly unlikely that collective agency is the appropriate institutional design for adaptive management in the most general case. Although I will argue that in a limited range of cases collective agency should be an regulative ideal toward which we should press institutional structures. This tentative conclusion is shown to point toward two general, more practical lessons: an increased recognition of the importance of social practices in the development of responsive institutions, and a sensible worry about relying on institutional agents to do our work for us.
My research in ethical theory proceeds along two related fronts. First, I am interested in developing the resources of indirect consequentialism to rebuff some of the criticisms raised against consequentialism, in particular, the charge that consequentialism cannot accommodate a variety of features common to our everyday moral lives. These features are generally taken to include special obligations, interpersonal commitments, and agent relative considerations. I contend that consequentialism can provide everything one would want from directed reasons and agent relativism; what it cannot accommodate we should not want to include in a moral theory anyway. Second, I am interested in pursuing the ways in which our membership, participation, and other involvement in various forms of collectives conditions our values, reasons, and moral lives.
I am interested in pursuing these interests through a project considering the relationship between directed reasons, social practices, and consequentialism. Directed reasons are those reasons that rely for their normative significance on the authority one individual has with respect to another; that authority provides grounds for justified complaint if the reason is not recognized. But, in the case of directed reasons, that standing for complaint is not fully general. The authority granted is granted to an individual; hence the directed nature of these reasons. The reasons generated by an act of promising provide a prototypical example of directedness, though most acts of permission or authorization will share this characteristic. Promises are made to particular individuals, and promisees have a special standing with respect to promisors. This directed nature of promissory obligations is commonly thought to count against an account of promising that relies entirely on social practices. The difficulty of integrating promising into a consequentialist-friendly social practice account is commonly thought to extend to all directed reasons. However, I believe that social practices can indeed provide the required authority for directed reasons and their attendant commitments because they have significantly more robust normative features than are usually recognized. The question I hope to answer in this project is this: how might we integrate directed reasons within a social practice framework without losing the normative significance of these reasons? By examining the way directed obligations rely on practices I hope to show that directed reasons are not merely grounded in practice; they are constituent parts of practices. Directed commitments like promising rely on the practice conferred-status of those holding and those subject to the commitment. There is a viable account of directed reasons, then, that relies on consequentialist friendly social practices; with directed reasons thus accommodated, special obligations follow and one of the main difficulties faced by consequentialism can be overcome. Directed reasons, I shall argue, only make sense within practice-determined roles and the authority these roles engender. Given the importance of directed reasons to questions of identity and the significance of social practices to philosophical issues in the social sciences, this project has a significance that extends beyond normative ethics.
1. “On That Peculiarly Discursive Practice of Promising” Philosophical Studies 140.8 (2008): 385-399
ABS: T. M. Scanlon has alleged that the social practice of promising fails to capture the sense in which when I break my promise I have wronged the promisee in particular. I suggest the practice of promising requires the promisee to have a normatively significant status, a status with interpersonal authority with respect to the promisor, and so be at risk of a particular harm made possible by the social practice of promising. This formulation of the social practice account avoids Scanlon’s concern without collapsing into what Elinor Mason has recently referred to as deflationism about promising.
2. “Exploitation, Participation, and Equal Recognition: Walker and Thomas on the presupposition of equal recognition in asymmetrical power arrangements” in Jorge Gracia (ed) Race or Ethnicity? Cornell University Press, 2007, 189-205.
ABS: Distinguishing one social group from another on the basis of race and ethnicity often facilitates exploitation. Lawrence Thomas argues that recognition of common humanity is often presupposed by many of those interacting in exploitative but non-capricious relationships. Margaret Urban Walker counters that this misses the complexity of moral recognition. However Walker’s analysis appears to focus on moral appraisal, rather than moral recognition. In defense of Thomas I argue there is a common status among individuals situated in dramatically unequal positions, which makes power inequalities and morally contemptible interactions between these individuals yet more morally blameworthy. Practices reinforcing many forms of exploitation require that one presuppose the moral status of the exploited, but this status need not be humanity or moral personhood. This gives an added dimension to the great wrong of exploitation without relying on unrealistic claims that the exploiters must recognize the humanity of the exploited.
3. “On Membership and Participation in Discursive Practices,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36.1 (2006): 67-85.
ABS: For a view which grounds norms in the practices of a particular group, determining who is in that group will determine the scope of those norms. Such a view requires an account of what it is to be a member of the group subject to that practice. In this paper I present the beginnings of such an account. I limit my inquiry to discursive practices; we might characterize such practices as those which require, as a condition of participation, participants both to exchange reasons with one another and to recognize that practice as a common source of reasons. I argue that membership in such groups is constituted by the conjunction of shared discursive practices, common recognition of the authority of that practice, and commitments between members. In the case of discursive practices, these features of membership are inseparable.
4. “The Practice Dependence of Respect,” under review
ABS: When something is taken to be an appropriate object of respect, that which is respected is thought to have a special sort of value; the object of respect (often a person) is taken to have an important standing. But respect does not confer this moral standing; rather, respect is an attitude that makes a particular status – namely, having intrinsic value or value in itself – recognizable. In cases where values depend on social practices when we try to determine what has intrinsic value we would do well to look to the attitudes required of us as a precondition, as an enabling condition, of participation in those practices. Respect is one such attitude. This paper presents an argument that there is a form of respect that should be understood as a constitutive feature of practices; this form of respect serves to differentiate intrinsic from instrumental value within a given practice.
5. “The Agent Relativity of Directed Reasons: Salvaging Teleology” (Preliminary version presented in Pasadena at 2008 Pacific Meetings of the APA)
ABS: Directed reasons are reasons that rely for their normative significance on the authority one individual has with respect to another. Acts such as promising seem to generate such reasons. These reasons seem paradigmatically agent relative: they do not hold for all agents. This paper provides a defense of the claim that the form of agent relativism seemingly required by directed reasons is innocuous, and poses no general problem for a practice dependent account of directed reasons, and, therefore, for consequentialism. While the position I present does not constitute a complete teleological account of value, it points toward a way of integrating directed reasons into a practice-based teleological account of value. The position presented also remains consistent with the so called Compelling Idea that often motivates consequentialism: it is always permissible for an agent to do what will lead to the outcome that is best.
III. Collective Constitution, Collective Action, and Collective Responsibility
I have a continuing interest in the nature and structure of collective agents (one of the central issues of my doctoral dissertation), and those groupings of individuals that do not constitute collective agents but are still causally, and even normatively, efficacious. I have written on collective responsibility and its relation to collective agency, and on the normative influence collectives can have on their individual members.
As a practical upshot of this interest in collective constitution and agency, I hope, in the not-so-distant future, to provide an account of the sorts of institutional structures appropriate for adaptive management. Some institutional structures are certainly more suited to being responsive to the object of their concern or purpose. But, especially in the case of matters environmental, is it possible for any real institution charged with the formation, implementation, or enforcement of environmental policy to satisfy the conditions for collective agency? If it is not possible or the conditions under which such robust institutions are possible are extremely limited or transitory, what are the consequences of this limitation for matters of policy, for the object of that institution’s concern, and for the development of an adequate environmental value theory? I think we can learn much about the nature of environmental value theory from the practical matters of institutionalizing policy we can learn about practical matters of environmental policy from environmental value theory.
1. “Programming Collective Responsibility,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38.3 (2007): 442-455.
ABS: Accounts of collective responsibility generally rely on notions of collective agency. But collective agency is at least as problematic as collective responsibility. I suggest that relying on explanatory significance of the collective provides a better means of attributing collective responsibility. I argue that we can be warranted in attributing collective responsibility in cases where a collective plays a particularly ineliminable role in the production of some state of affairs. This ineliminable role can be seen in cases where the collective provides the normative conditions under which the actions of members are coordinated so as to produce a harm or benefit of a different kind than those individual members are capable of producing on their own. The program model of explanation provides a template for describing the causal relevance of collectives in the generation of states of affairs, and for describing the form of responsibility attributable to collectives.
2. "The Conundrum of Collective Commitment," Social Theory and Practice 30.4 (2004): 535-557.
ABS: This paper contests Margaret Gilbert’s claim that when individuals enter into an agreement with each other they generate a new type of commitment, formally distinct from their individual or personal commitments. However, if these “joint commitments” are formally distinct from our individual commitments, and if we understand their subjects to be irreducible, it is difficult to see how individual obligations can be had entirely in virtue of joint commitments. This problems would lead us to look for the normative basis of these obligations in the individual commitments of persons rather than in a sui generis form of collective commitment.
3. Thinking Through Collectives, McMahon’s Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning and Graham’s Practical Reasoning in a Social World,” Social Theory and Practice (Review Essay). 30:1 (2004): 127-149.
ABS: In Practical Reasoning in a Social World Keith Graham argues that certain elements of our social world are preconditions of both the reasons we use in deliberation and the actions over which we deliberate. In collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning Christopher McMahon has generated an account of collective reasoning that allows for the collective to serve as a repository for commonly held reasons and arguments. I argue that although both of these works advance the subject they each encounter a difficulty that derives from the nature of collective subjects and the relation between collective subjects and the individual subjects that largely constitute them. I then point to an alternative model of this relation better suited to their projects.
1. “Internal Motivation, External Motivation, and Educating for Happiness”, part of symposium in response to a conversation with his Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (20 Sep 2006). Buffalo Law Review, 55.2 (2007): 695-702.
During a visit of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet to the campus of the University at Buffalo the Law School hosted a conference on Law, Buddhism, and Social Change, which the His Holiness attended. When asked questions about the nature of law and legal institutions the responses were focused less on institutional design, but on the character of those who held positions of authority. In this paper I argue that this apparent shift of focus brings up an interesting point of moral psychology. The point of moral psychology is found in a potential tension between diverse motivations: those found in common construals of law, and those found in Buddhist notions of personal development. More particularly, law motivates right action through external constraint, Buddhism through the universal drive for the alleviation of suffering. Put another way, law operates by means of external norms; Buddhism (and any religious traditions focused on perfection of character) operates by means of internal norms.
In His Holiness’s response to questions about law and institutional design we can see a way of dealing with this incongruity: education. But, again, the appeal to education is not a mere platitude; there is a profound conceptual matter which underlies education as a way of dealing with this tension. Education of a particular form provides the best way to resolve this tension—and this mode of resolution does not depend on the particular appeals His Holiness made to education, but rather on the way someone who advocates an ethic of personal perfection must treat norms that operate through social reinforcement. The tension between law and internal norms has an effect on the nature and purpose of what I suggest would be characteristically Buddhist law.
2. "Quine's Ethical Dilemma," Dialectica, 54.4 (1998): 319-338.
While Quine clearly states his position regarding the difference between the methodology of ethics and that of science, he is less clear on the nature of ethical language. Variously, he treats ethical sentences as cognitive and noncognitive. If ethical "sentences" are noncognitive, they do not admit of truth or falsity and, therefore, have no claim to be occasion sentences or observation sentences. And moral theory is, thereby, clearly demarcated from science. If ethical sentences are cognitive, however, we could have ethical occasion sentences. It would be easier, on this interpretation, to make sense of Quine's insistence that ethics is subject to a coherency theory of truth, and that we may have real derivative and ultimate moral conflicts. I argue that, as Quine's system now stands, there are good reasons to take either interpretation.
3. “Charity, Humanity, Empathy: What Room for Value?” in Chase B. Wrenn, ed. Naturalism, Ontology, and Reference: Essays in Honor of Roger F. Gibson New York, Peter Lang, 2008.
(extended ABS) The precise characterization of Quine’s Principle of Charity is contentious, with some arguing that it is merely a heuristic for successful translation (Jackman, Gibson) and others that it is a precondition of meaning (Davidson, Feleppa). But leaving aside this contentious issue as much as possible, Quine’s point seems to be that when faced with translation of claims of others belief agreement should be maximized. But does this principle extend beyond matters of belief? Can we strive to maximize agreement about value? The conditions under which empathy provides a useful means of acquiring what Quine calls occasion sentences indicates that empathy allows the acquisition of sentences without direct sense experience, that is, without requiring an observation sentence. If empathy provides for a means of adopting values in a manner just (or nearly) as reliable as beliefs, then the strict division between belief and value, so central to Quine’s treatment of moral values, is cast into doubt. Most importantly for our purposes here, if empathy provides a means of accessing not only beliefs but also values, then, according to the principle of charity we seek not merely to maximize agreement in belief, but in value as well. This requires a significantly different conceptualization of Quine’s principle of charity. My focus in this paper is on the theoretical intersection of empathy and charity, and the degree to which allowing empathy so central a role in the acquisition of belief requires a modification of the notion of charity, a modification that makes Quine’s principle of charity look much more like Richard Grandy’s principle of humanity.