Publications

“The Range of Moral Responsibility: A Beauvoirian Model.” (2025) European Journal of Philosophy. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejop.70023.

Abstract: In this paper, I propose a view that extends the range of our core agency to include contributions our actions make to public values. This Extended Range View takes seriously Simone de Beauvoir’s suggestion that values are not merely handed to us but created and shaped together by our actions. If we properly appreciate the moral weight of our contributions to the value systems that we all engage in—what I will call our evaluative landscape—then we can explain how we can be responsible for the free actions of others. This view significantly extends what we will need to think of as our responsibility (though not to a fully unrestricted range). I will also suggest, however, that we accept a pluralist view about responsibility on which the way that we take responsibility and hold agents responsible for these kinds of value-based contributions is different from the standard responsibility practices like blame, punishment, and guilt.

In Preparation

Drafts available upon request.

A paper on moral repair [under review]

Moral repair is often understood as achievable through the familiar sequence of protest, apology, and forgiveness between victim and wrongdoer. But some wrongs continue to shape the normative environment even after the perpetrator has repented and forgiveness has been granted. This paper argues that whether interpersonal repair is sufficient depends on the structure of the wrongdoing itself. I distinguish between cases of constrained and extended normative significance and argue that features such as publicity, identity-tracking, and institutionalization can extend a wrong’s normative significance beyond the victim-perpetrator pair. When wrongdoing extends in this way, it generates distinct threat types, including repetition, uptake, and internalization. Successful moral repair therefore requires reshaping the normative landscape in which the wrong continues to have effects. Forgiveness plays an important but limited role in this process: it ratifies the resolution of certain interpersonal threats, but cannot by itself address vulnerabilities sustained by third parties, social uptake, or internalized distortions of agency. In such cases, protest remains necessary, though transformed: post-forgiveness protest resists uptake and internalization in the broader social world.

Works in Progress

Karl Jaspers on Communicative Self-Becoming

In this paper, I argue that the way that Karl Jaspers envisions the ideal psychiatrist-patient relationship in his early psychiatric writings, especially Allgemeine Psychopathologie, shows us how existential communication functions as a means of self-becoming. That is, the Jasperian approach to psychiatric therapy illuminates the key elements of self-becoming in the particular case of mental illness; these elements, however, are central to the general task of self-becoming. In showing how the psychiatrist acts as a communicative partner, Jaspers shows how self-becoming is not a task that can be undertaken alone. This paper thus lays the groundwork for developing a fundamentally intersubjective theory of self-becoming.

On Existential Violence

In this paper, I suggest that there is a particular mode of violence– existential violence– that occurs when the perpetrator makes it impossible for the victim to continue being the self he once was, and once had chosen. While existential violence largely occurs in conjunction with other, more familiar forms of harm, I think it can be one of the most difficult forms of harm to address due to its personal and identity-based nature. I argue, drawing on work by Susan Brison and L.A. Paul, that existential violence is a kind of transformative experience that forces an individual to become a new self.