I am an ethicist working primarily in the social realm. I specialize in the meaning of life, with a particular focus on questions concerning meaning in group contexts.
I also have keen interests in early modern philosophy and metaphysics.
Publications
“Rethinking Student Dress Codes in Canada: Autonomy, Free Speech, and Responsible Student Engagement," Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy (forthcoming; accepted Feb. 2024).
“Group Immortality and Transgenerational Meaning.” The Monist 106, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 209-223.
Current Projects
Social Groups and Meaning in Life
Argues that social groups can lead meaningful group lives, and that meaning cannot be assessed summatively, but instead through Gilbertian joint commitment.
Collective Intentionality and Second-Order Desires
Argues for three claims: (1) social groups can have second-order desires; (2) compared to individuals, social groups can more easily align their first- and second-order desires; and, surprisingly, (3) one way for individuals to increase freedom of the will is to give up some amount of freedom over to social groups that align with the individual's second-order desires.
The Persistence Conditions of Transgenerational Groups
Leading theories of personal identity appeal to psychological continuity as the fundamental criterion for assessing numerical identity across time. I draw on recent work on collective memory to show how a similar strategy is possible in cases of group identity across generations. I offer a joint commitment account of collective memory that allows us to make sense of transgenerational social group identity through changes in membership.
Dissertation
Title: Meaning and Social Phenomena
Committee: Aaron James (chair), Margaret Gilbert, and Karl Schafer
Abstract:
Can groups like labor unions, baseball teams, and philosophy departments lead meaningful lives as groups? And if they can, what does talk of “meaning” amount to in this context? My dissertation, Meaning and Social Phenomena, addresses these questions. The project has two parts. The first develops a hybrid account of meaning in life, according to which meaning is a matter of narratable relations that are evaluable from both a first- and a third-person perspective. The second applies this account to various social phenomena -- including group well-being and group immortality -- to show that recent work on meaning in life that focuses on individuals can be “scaled up” to investigate new questions at the intersection of ethics, social ontology, and political philosophy.
To motivate my discussion of the meaning of group lives, I first argue for accounts of “meaning” and “life” such that it makes sense to talk about meaning in life from the perspective of the life of a group. To do this, I distinguish meaning from properties like pleasure, happiness, and fulfillment. Meaning is a matter of narratable relations, and any person or group that can be narrated in the relevant sense constitutes a life. Here I expand on recent work focused on narrative accounts of meaning in life from the perspective of the individual to show that my hybrid narrative account of meaning in life is both coherent and useful in the group context.
I then show how this account of meaning in life applies to a variety of social phenomena. I first argue that social groups like philosophy departments and baseball teams can lead meaningful lives in a manner that is not reducible to the sum of the meaning of the individual lives that constitute them. Indeed, these two levels of analysis are wholly distinct: the meaning instantiated by the group may be greater or less than the sum of the meaning of the individuals lives that make up the group. Then I discuss some of the implications of this for the ethics of social groups, and political philosophy more generally. I end with an analysis of group immortality, arguing that common objections to individual immortality -- like boredom and the pain of inevitable traumatic events -- do not apply in the group case. Although we may not be able to hope for immortality for ourselves, we can and often should hope that good group lives go on forever.
In the end, the dissertation argues for the importance of a social analysis of meaning in life. The upshot is twofold: understanding the nature and import of meaning in life in group contexts has positive practical implications for the groups under analysis as well as the individuals that constitute them. The result is a social ontology with implications for applied ethics, political philosophy, and beyond.