Research
My research, which is primarily in social and political philosophy and ethics, focuses on the theory of freedom and coercion, on the social organization of work, and on Marx and Marxism.
My core research project to date has been about freedom. Dominant contemporary philosophical conceptions of freedom, I argue, do not put us in a position to understand some of the most basic truths about freedom and unfreedom: for example, why a slave who does her master’s bidding in order to avoid a beating acts unfreely, even though she makes a reasoned choice in the pursuit of her own ends. To address this problem as well as others, I am developing a novel theory of freedom. The core idea is that free activity must be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated. I argue that this account rests entirely on conventional and attractive premises. Yet it has radical implications. For example, if I am right, we can understand what is wrong with coercion only if we recognize that other, noncoercive forms of incentivization commonly thought to be innocuous—wages, for example—are in fact autonomy-compromising and objectionable in some of the same ways. Here are drafts of two relevant papers, currently under review:
The second strand of my current research is more applied and focuses on the social organization of work. Recently, there has been a renewed interest among political philosophers in various forms of worker participation in decision-making at work. Such participation, it has been argued, could address problems ranging from arbitrary interference in workers’ lives to the absence of meaningful work. While I am sympathetic to these proposals, I argue that they have been importantly limited—both empirically and normatively—by their focus on the individual firm in isolation from the broader economic context in which firms operate. Even egalitarian and democratic firms, I argue, are likely to be compelled by the pressure of competition to make managerial decisions which fail to take adequate account of workers’ interests in important respects. To bring into view both the problem and what is needed to address it, I defend a more demanding ideal of economic self-government beyond the individual workplace, at the level of society as a whole.
While primarily systematic, my research is rooted in an engagement with the history of philosophy—especially the work of Marx and the Aristotelian and German Idealist traditions by which he was influenced—and some of my work is directly about Marx. For instance, I defend a novel reading of Marx’s conceptions of alienation and communism based not on a substantive conception of the human good but on the formal motivational structure characteristic of free productive activity. In addition, I plan to write on Marx’s idea that production under capitalism is distinctively and objectionably “anarchical”—an idea which I believe holds important lessons for thinking about freedom but also about the meaning, justification, and implications of democracy.
My core research project to date has been about freedom. Dominant contemporary philosophical conceptions of freedom, I argue, do not put us in a position to understand some of the most basic truths about freedom and unfreedom: for example, why a slave who does her master’s bidding in order to avoid a beating acts unfreely, even though she makes a reasoned choice in the pursuit of her own ends. To address this problem as well as others, I am developing a novel theory of freedom. The core idea is that free activity must be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated. I argue that this account rests entirely on conventional and attractive premises. Yet it has radical implications. For example, if I am right, we can understand what is wrong with coercion only if we recognize that other, noncoercive forms of incentivization commonly thought to be innocuous—wages, for example—are in fact autonomy-compromising and objectionable in some of the same ways. Here are drafts of two relevant papers, currently under review:
- "Autonomy and Coercion"—a paper about social freedom and unfreedom
- "Freedom, Desire, and Necessity"—a paper about freedom in relation to the external world more generally, including not just other people but also natural circumstances.
The second strand of my current research is more applied and focuses on the social organization of work. Recently, there has been a renewed interest among political philosophers in various forms of worker participation in decision-making at work. Such participation, it has been argued, could address problems ranging from arbitrary interference in workers’ lives to the absence of meaningful work. While I am sympathetic to these proposals, I argue that they have been importantly limited—both empirically and normatively—by their focus on the individual firm in isolation from the broader economic context in which firms operate. Even egalitarian and democratic firms, I argue, are likely to be compelled by the pressure of competition to make managerial decisions which fail to take adequate account of workers’ interests in important respects. To bring into view both the problem and what is needed to address it, I defend a more demanding ideal of economic self-government beyond the individual workplace, at the level of society as a whole.
While primarily systematic, my research is rooted in an engagement with the history of philosophy—especially the work of Marx and the Aristotelian and German Idealist traditions by which he was influenced—and some of my work is directly about Marx. For instance, I defend a novel reading of Marx’s conceptions of alienation and communism based not on a substantive conception of the human good but on the formal motivational structure characteristic of free productive activity. In addition, I plan to write on Marx’s idea that production under capitalism is distinctively and objectionably “anarchical”—an idea which I believe holds important lessons for thinking about freedom but also about the meaning, justification, and implications of democracy.