• Social Roles and Exculpatory Ignorance (R&R)

When are we blameworthy for wrongdoing committed in the course of our jobs? I argue that our social roles involve deliberative norms. Agents who conform to those norms may neglect moral considerations that bear on their decisions—and do so for good reason. According to some theorists, this can excuse them from blame. But even those who deny that moral ignorance exculpates, arguing that what matters is responsiveness to moral considerations, should take role-occupants' excuses seriously. The upshot is a novel position in the debate about moral ignorance as an excuse.​ 

Draft available upon request.

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• The Normative Character of Social Roles

Philosophical orthodoxy holds that social roles do not themselves have normative force: agents only have genuine normative reasons to comply with their role norms when doing so is explained by independent moral principles. I disagree. Instead, I argue that role norms’ contribution to functioning social practices generates genuine normative reasons for role-occupants to comply with those norms as such. I motivate this view by showing that other models of role normativity face significant structural and practical challenges. While popular accounts of role normativity often maintain that moral considerations can cancel roles’ normative force, my project suggests a radically different conclusion: role-occupants have good reasons to comply even with norms that require them to act immorally or unjustly. 

Draft available upon request.

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• Role Participation in Structural Injustice

What are individuals’ responsibilities for structural injustice? I argue that our participation in structural injustice through our social roles generates distinctive responsibilities to address those particular injustices. In doing so, this paper makes a methodological intervention into the conversation about responsibility for structural injustice. Drawing inspiration from theorists who object to consequentialist explanations for the moral significance of partiality, I argue that explanations of the normative significance of participation in structural injustice are unsatisfying when grounded in consequences alone. 

Draft available upon request.

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• Caring Social Structures

Feminist ethics of care has historically struggled to reconcile its commitment to large-scale political change with its emphasis on attitudes and relationships. I propose resolving this tension by focusing on an intermediate level between institutions and individuals: how our practices relate us to each other as role-occupants. In addition to meeting needs (e.g. through social service programs) and facilitating caring interpersonal relationships (e.g. alleviating care sector burnout), social structures can manifest care. Structural features like incentives, distribution of power, role ideals, and norms can express more or less fitting attitudes about value. This has two upshots: first, care ethics can avoid criticisms of parochialism by vindicating the significance of attitudes and relationships beyond the individual level. Second, insofar as we ought to be in caring relations with others, complying with uncaring role norms can generate responsibilities to work for change. 

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• Social Philosophy for Tech Ethics Pedagogy (with Sonia Maria Pavel)

This project is based on our experience designing and teaching an expanded version of MIT’s Experiential Ethics course. The key commitment of Experiential Ethics is teaching ethics as a skill. To this end, we emphasize tools rather than theories (e.g. conversations about universalizability and character rather than deontology and virtue ethics) and allow students’ interdisciplinary expertise to drive the course. In other teaching, we noticed that a focus on individual decision-making can backfire: students correctly recognize that their individual agency as engineers or coders is limited, so they do not take up ethical questions as their own. Pavel and I designed new units for Experiential Ethics that incorporated more social philosophy, focusing on the structural and systemic nature of agency and social change. The revised course successfully prompted a broader engagement with ethics: 100% of students reported an increased ability to identify and critically evaluate ethical dimensions of real-world situations, interpret ethical arguments, and advocate for real-world ethical decisions in communities they participate in.

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