My Research
Metaethics has traditionally focused on the individual. We often define metaethical views, for instance, according to the function that normativity serves for the individual: representational, practical, emotive, expressive. Even when attention shifts to the social, it is usually to the we—the moral community, the group, the species. My work starts from a different place—not individuality, not sameness, but difference. How I ought to treat you depends, almost always, on who I am and who you are—parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, citizen and immigrant. Norms organize us into diverse social identities, roles, and positions, and these structures constitute the bulk of our normative lives. My research develops a social metaethics that takes this diversity as foundational. I seek to understand a) the structural relationships between norms and these social roles and identities, b) the social functions of this normative diversity, c) the social practices that shape and maintain it, and d) the tension between social arbitrariness (social norms seem "up to us") and social objectivity (normative identities like race take on a social reality of their own).
My dissertation, Metaethics is Social, lays some of the building blocks of this project. I focus on two traditions—Kantian constructivism and expressivism—examining what commitments must be elaborated, reoriented, and rejected once we put social roles and identities at the center of the story.
In my chapter on Kantian constructivism, reorganized in this application as a standalone writing sample, I aim to make sense of the structural relationship between social identities and interpersonal norms. Building on Christine Korsgaard’s theory that norms and practical identities co-constitute one another, I argue that interpersonal norms are also co-constitutive with the identity of the one the norms concern—the one who is owed something and can be wronged by a violation of those norms. I call this a “patient identity.” This simple extension of the constructivist view ends up threatening the constructivist’s central claim that we self-legislate normativity. Our practical and patient identities are often inseparable in social practice—to be a student, for instance, is to be both agent and patient in normative relation to teachers. If the norms I self-legislate are co-constitutive with another’s patient identity, and this patient identity is inseparable from their practical identity, self-legislation is at risk of collapsing into other-legislation. I argue that existing constructivist resources—in particular, theories of mutual recognition—fail to avoid this result.
I then turn from structure to function, reconstructing a neglected line of expressivist thought on the social functions of normative discourse. Classic expressivism claims that the function of normative discourse is to express our affective attitudes. But in parentheticals, asides, and overlooked passages, expressivists also argue that it functions to coordinate our behavioral dispositions—to get us on the same page. I build on this neglected idea but argue that coordination is rarely uniform. Normative discourse does not lead us to converge on a single behavior; it establishes differentiated patterns of behavior across roles, identities, and positions. I call this phenomenon “differential conformist behavior.” Establishing what teacher and student ought to do, for instance, generates not convergent behavior, but complementarity behavior that together forms a social practice: the teacher assigns and assesses while the students complete and submit. Normative discourse thus structures differential, inter-group attitudes and behavioral dispositions in ways that make possible specialization, highly complex social practices, and the structured exercise of power.
Building on the dissertation’s social turn in metaethics, I have another paper that locates normative objectivity within the social form of normative discourse. The paper defends quasi-realism against Sharon Street’s Darwinian dilemma. According to Street, if quasi-realism succeeds in mimicking realism (with its commitments to normative truth, objectivity, and mind-independence), then it is vulnerable to an evolutionary debunking argument: natural selection does not track mind-independent normative truths. I argue that this problem dissolves once we recognize that the objectivity of moral discourse is not a Platonic mystery but a feature of the social practice of moral discourse. Drawing on Robert Brandom’s default and challenge structure of entitlement, I argue that when assert normative claims, we undertake the responsibility to give reasons that could entitle anyone to assert them. Evolutionary and cultural shifts in our normative commitments shift the entitlements we attribute, and thus shift the shape of normative objectivity—leaving no fixed target for Street’s dilemma to grip. The result is a socially grounded quasi-realism: one that resolves the tension between evolution and objectivity.
My future research will deepen and extend this project of a social metaethics along several dimensions. One direction is to develop a theory of social recognition, hinted at in my current work, that draws from Kantian constructivists and metaethical constitutivists, but which is consistent with the account of co-constitutive identities I develop in my dissertation (and in my attached writing sample). My aim here is to explore whether and how recognition might take over the practical function of normative judgment that Kantians attribute to self-legislation, without itself turning into a mechanism of normative construction.
A second direction will broaden and extend my arguments against normative construction, drawing on quasi-realist metaethics and pragmatist philosophy of language. While I argue that normativity is social at its core, I also contend that no account of normative construction as a general theory of the source of normativity will succeed, even in cases of social identities like race and gender. On my view, normative construction is itself a normative practice: to legislate is already to have the authority to do so. The point is to locate the proper place of the social—not in construction but in the structure of normativity and in the human practices that shape the way this normativity shows up to us. This direction will require separate dialogues with various positions in metaethics, as well as with social ontologists who work on accounts of social construction.
A third direction, likely to culminate in a book-length project, is to bring my work on expressivism, Kantian constructivism, and quasi-realist objectivity together into a unified “pragmatic social constitutivism.” How can theories of social functions, social structures, and social discursive practices fit together into a coherent social metaethical position—one that satisfies enough of the motivations at the core of these traditions without generating inconsistencies? What can a view like this do for us that expressivism, constructivism, and quasi-realism can’t? What can it tell us about normative diversity in our social world—our social roles, positions, and identities? How might it intersect with theories in social ontology, social epistemology, and normative and practical ethics?
Beyond these specific directions, I see this project as opening a broader research program in social metaethics. I intend for this work to remain in close dialogue with philosophers across disciplines who are already investigating the social world—in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics. My goal is to move metaethics out of its silos of abstract, individualistic theorizing and into the trenches of social life. Doing so not only will better capture the nature of normativity, but will offer promising, urgently needed ways of understanding ourselves as social beings.