Working
Here are a few of my working papers. Please do not cite these drafts or circulate them without permission.
Sincerity and Diversity (PDF)
Abstract: A common concern among public reason liberals and deliberative democrats is that citizens’ contributions to public life be sincere. Good citizens are those who offer good or sufficient reasons to others in good faith and out of respect for their naturally free and equal compatriots. I argue that principles of sincerity conceal considerable ambiguity about the nature of justificatory reasons and their use in relevant contexts. For instance, it is often unclear what it means to offer good or sufficient reasons in good faith. Most sincerity proponents argue that sincerity requires offering shared or public reasons in the public square. I deny this. Instead, I argue that citizens are sincerity in public dialogue when they offer reasons for their political positions and advocacy that they themselves endorse or reasons that they believe others will endorse. I thereby develop a convergence-based principle of sincerity in contrast with consensus-based principles. I end by arguing that a convergence-based principle of sincerity alters public reason”s conception of civic life.
Second Person Rules: Resolving the Idealization Puzzle for Second-Person Normativity (PDF)
Abstract:Stephen Darwall’s recent work, The Second-Person Standpoint, has provided a valuable set of insights into the nature of our practices of holding one another responsible for wrongdoing, making moral demands of others and blaming them for infractions. If Darwall is right, we can move beyond his account of second-personality and examine how his understanding of second-person normativity provides the framework for a continuing research program in moral philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to help develop such a framework by identifying a puzzle for Darwall’s account of second-personal normativity and resolving it in favor of an alternative account. Specifically, I shall argue that Darwall’s account of second-personality is torn between actual and hypothetical interpretations, that is, between different levels of idealization. In some writings, Darwall stresses that the second-person standpoint is tied up with real-world authorities and reactive attitudes and that obligations require some form of actual recognition by the relevant moral community. But in other writings, Darwall repeatedly insists that the appropriate form of recognition occurs merely among hypothetical members of a kingdom of ends, members we serve as representatives. I maintain that Darwall that both interpretations present serious difficulties, even if Darwall could have it both ways (which he cannot). In response, I argue that second-personality should be applied first and foremost to publicly recognized rules of conduct. Rules play an intermediary role between actual practices of moral address and accountability and hypothetical rational endorsement of these practices. I argue that real-world moral address, justification and accountability occurs via moral rules that are themselves the object of hypothetical endorsement. The introduction of social-moral rules into the second-person standpoint resolves Darwall’s puzzle of idealization.