Selected Papers:
1. Selflessness and Responsibility for Self: Is Deference Compatible with Autonomy? Philosophical Review 112:4 (October 2003) 483-523 (.pdf)
This paper argues that deep or “self-abnegating” deference to the will of another compromises autonomy even when that deference is wholeheartedly endorsed by the agent herself. Identificationist models of autonomy, such as those developed by Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman, appear unable to capture this defect of autonomy. This paper defends an alternative conception of autonomy centered on the notion of “responsibility for self,” understood as a disposition to hold oneself answerable, for one’s action-guiding commitments, to external critical perspectives. Self-governance of choice and action requires self-governance of practical reasoning, which in turn requires appropriate responsiveness to the normative pressures faced by reflective agents like us. Whereas the self-responsible agent can be engaged in potentially open-ended justificatory dialogue about her action-guiding commitments, self-abnegating deference undermines such responsiveness, thereby undermining the self-responsibility that is crucial to autonomy.
2. The Reunion of Marriage, forthcoming in The Monist, Special Issue on Marriage
In
this paper I examine the idea that relationships of “companion love,” such as
marriage, involve some significant form of union or shared identity between the
lovers. I first offer a critique of
existing "union" views, according to which the interests and
identities of parties to such relationships are merged in a way that would seem
to erode their autonomy. I argue that
parties to love relationships may non-pathologically share an identity by
sharing ends and practical reasons -- or by occupying what I call a “joint
practical perspective”-- and that coming to share a practical perspective is an
interpersonal, dialogical process that not only preserves the autonomy of the
parties involved, but in an important sense depends on it.
An earlier version of this paper
appears, under a different title, in the working papers series at the
3. Rethinking Relational Autonomy, forthcoming in Hypatia Volume 24, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2009).
In recent years the concept of “relational autonomy” has gained considerable currency among feminist philosophers and other parties to the autonomy debates. Many relational theorists take social factors to play a crucial causal role in the development of autonomy. Some argue that social factors are, in addition, partly constitutive of autonomy. John Christman has recently argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy are problematic insofar as they imply a suspect perfectionism about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism. Autonomy relies (in part) on a disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one’s action-guiding commitments. Autonomy thus requires an irreducibly dialogical form of reflectiveness. But this type of relationality is formal, not substantive, and carries no specific value commitments. The paper closes with some comments on the significance of this sort of relationality to feminist theory.
For an earlier, conference-length version of this paper, click here.
4. Joint Deliberation and the Sharing of Reasons (.pdf)
In this paper I develop a conception of joint practical deliberation as a special type of shared cooperative activity, through which co-deliberators jointly accept reasons as applying to them as a pair or group. Co-deliberators, I argue, aim not just to coordinate their reasons and actions (as do bargainers), but to share reasons in a strong sense: they aim to form the joint subject of certain reasons for action. The term “plural subject” is borrowed from Margaret Gilbert (1989; 1996; 2000). I argue that joint deliberation is a process of jointly constructing a practical perspective that doesn’t already exist (at least in full), and that a broadly Gilbertian model of this process appropriately construes it as one of establishing, rather than simply discovering, shared reasons. On this model, we form the plural subject of a reason when we exchange expressions of conditional readiness jointly to accept some consideration as action-guiding. But there is more to this mutual conditional readiness than immediately meets the eye. I argue that the aspiration to deliberative “pairhood” is distinguished by its normative properties, and specifically by a special concern for mutuality that guides each deliberator’s readiness to accept a given consideration as a reason-for-us. As joint deliberators, it matters to each of us that each party’s (individual) reasons for accepting something as a reason-for-us support a conception of our relationship as one characterized by mutual, non-instrumental concern for one another. Throughout most of the paper, I treat deliberators’ mutual concern as deriving from relations of friendship or love in which each party already cares about the other for her own sake. I suggest, however, that a commitment to deliberative mutuality of the sort I describe may arise in a far broader range of relationships, although these may in some sense take relations of friendship and love as their model.
5. Anger, Faith, and Forgiveness (.pdf)
Recent philosophical literature on
forgiveness has, with a few exceptions, converged on the view that to forgive
is to overcome resentment for moral reasons.
In this literature, it is typically taken for granted that overcoming
(that is, eliminating) resentment and/or other negative emotions is a necessary
condition for genuine forgiveness. The
view that forgiveness requires overcoming resentment has sometimes been
mistakenly attributed to Joseph Butler.
Drawing on