Books:
Working as Equals: Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace, co-edited with J. Jonker (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Forthcoming and published articles and chapters:
"Organizational Partiality and Relational Equality" Journal of Moral Philosophy (forthcoming)
I critically explore the phenomenon of managerial moral vigilantism, whereby managers use their organizational authority to take the moral law into their own hands, shirking the local, organizational values and aims that pertain to their decision-making for the sake of extra-organizational values and aims. I argue that, in doing so, they fail to treat their employees as moral equals, because they fail to respect the reasonable expectations that employees have about the values and aims that will constrain how organizational authority is wielded over them. In short, moral vigilante managers fail to show the kind of organizational partiality that relational equality requires. My conclusion, then, is that there is a limited kind of organizational partiality required by relational equality, a paradigmatic instance of which concerns how managers (or organizational superiors, more broadly) exercise their organizational authority.
"Corporate Moral Credit" Business Ethics Quarterly (online first)
When do companies deserve credit for doing what is right? This question about corporate moral creditworthiness concerns the positive side of corporate moral responsibility, the negative side of which is the more commonly discussed question of when companies are blameworthy for doing what is wrong. I offer a broadly functionalist account of how companies can act from morally creditworthy motives, in light of a serious challenge to the claim that they can. This challenge is posed by the Strawsonian idea that morally creditworthy motivation involves being guided by moral attitudes of “goodwill” for others, such as respect and care. Given how these attitudes involve affect and/or phenomenal consciousness, it is doubtful that companies can be guided by them. But I show that what matters about being guided by moral attitudes of goodwill is being directly concerned for others, and that such direct concern is achieved by the practical functioning of those attitudes - the roles they play in practical deliberation. Companies can realize this practical functioning through their decision-making and information-gathering procedures without having the affective and/or phenomenal states associated with moral attitudes of goodwill. I also explore how a company’s moral creditworthiness, or lack thereof, should shape our response to it.
"Good Enough for Equality" (forthcoming in Working as Equals volume)
The ideal of relating as equals is, in part, an ideal of virtue – the attitudes and dispositions that support social relations of equality. These are standardly taken to involve accepting the Equal Authority of other persons, giving other persons Equal Consideration, and treating the interests of other persons as having Equal Importance. But why does relational equality involve these attitudes and dispositions, and what exactly do they entail? I aim to make progress on answering these questions by focusing on adult autonomy, using the workplace as an apt setting for exploring the resulting autonomy-focused conception of relational egalitarian virtue. I first consider and reject an interest- focused conception of relational egalitarian virtue, which treats Equal Importance as central. This view allows for a paternalistic stance that is incompatible with social relations of equality. I then develop an autonomy-focused view that treats Equal Authority as central, what I call the “Authority-Centered Relational Egalitarian” virtue (ACRE). ACRE avoids the paternalistic implications of the interest-focused view. I conclude by exploring how managers can sustain and enact ACRE in exercising organizational authority over employees.
"How to Evaluate Managerial Nudges" Journal of Business Ethics (2023) - discussed in the "What Do You Make of This?" podcast and Rebecca Ruehle, "The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace," Business Ethics Quarterly
One reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as rational and/or autonomous (RA). Recent nudge-defenders have marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge their employees, they generally bolster their employees' limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge-critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge-defenders equivocate between two different senses of 'treating someone as RA.' The value-preserving notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to enhance RA capacities is different from the authority-recognizing notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, in order to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers.
"Roles, Rousseau, and Respect for Persons" Social Theory & Practice (2022)
The attitude of respect for persons involves accepting that persons have responsibilities, and not just authority, for making decisions about their lives and interactions with others. I show how we can readily capture this aspect of respect for persons with a role-based view, on which respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing others for a social role they occupy. To fill in a role-based view, we need to describe the practice into which the pertinent role figures and which encompasses all persons. To do this, my account draws on the Rousseauian idea of inflamed amour-propre. Roughly, respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing persons for the role they occupy in a ubiquitous social practice that helps solve the problem of inflamed amour-propre. You might worry that my role-based view compromises the non-contingency and universality of our standing to be respected as persons, but I show how my view preserves the aspects of this moral standing that matter most. I close by suggesting that my role-based view compares favorably to the prevailing “capacity-based” views on which respect for persons recognizes persons for their special agential capacities.
"The Virtues of Relational Equality at Work" Humanistic Management Journal (2022), special issue: "The Future of Work: Promoting Dignity and Human Flourishing")
How important is it for managers to have the “nice” virtues of modesty, civility, and humility? While recent scholarship has tended to focus on the organizational consequences of leaders having or lacking these traits, I want to address the prior, deeper question of whether and how these traits are intrinsically morally important. I argue that certain forms of modesty, civility, and humility have intrinsic importance as the virtues of relational equality – the attitudes and dispositions by which we relate as moral equals. I provide a novel account of the normative grounds of the virtues of relational equality and develop a corresponding framework for how these virtues can be enacted by managers. The virtues are grounded in the importance of dismantling objectionable forms of social hierarchy, which requires relations of equality whereby persons accept that they each have the same personal authority over their lives and interactions. I show how this view of virtue contrasts with the prevailing Aristotelian, Personalist, and Smithian “bourgeois virtue” views in business ethics. I then explain how, for managers, sustaining and enacting the virtues of relational equality involves a distinctive cluster of role-specific traits: respect for employees’ equal personal authority (modesty), a commitment to express such respect (civility), and giving equal weight and deference to employees’ relevant interests (humility).
Review of Suzy Killmister, Contours of Dignity Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2021)
Review of Alex Edmans, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit Business Ethics Quarterly (2021)
"Nudging for Rationality and Self-Governance" Ethics (2020)
Andreas Schmidt argues that ethicists have misplaced moral qualms about nudges insofar as their worries are about whether nudges treat us as rational agents, because nudges can enhance our rational agency. I think that Schmidt is right that nudges often enhance our rational agency; in fact, we can carry his conclusion further: nudges often enhance our self-governing agency, too. But this does not alleviate our worries that nudges fail to treat us as rational. This is shown by disambiguating two conceptions of treating-as-rational. The more plausible conception of treating-as-rational undermines Schmidt’s case that nudges often treat us as rational.
"When Vanity Is Dangerous" Philosophy & Public Affairs (2020)
Unjustifiably expecting a higher form of regard from others than one deserves is a familiar vice; call it the “vanity-vice.” How serious of a vice is it? Rousseau claims that it is uniquely morally dangerous. I show how Rousseau’s claim is true of only one form of the vanity-vice. I first develop an account of dangerous vices that takes seriously Rousseau’s concern about the anti-egalitarian vices associated with inflamed amour-propre. I then apply two, cross-cutting distinctions in vanity: a distinction in whether one cares about the correctness of one’s expectations of high regard, and a distinction in the kind of high regard one expects. When we do not care about the correctness of our inflated expectations of regard, and when the unduly high regard we expect is authority-recognizing deference, we manifest a form of vanity that is uniquely dangerous, what I call “entitled smugness.”
"The Anti-Inflammatory Basis of Equality" Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (2018)
We are moral equals, but in virtue of what? The most plausible answers to this question have pointed to our higher agential capacities, but we vary in the degrees to which we possess those capacities. How could they ground our equal moral standing, then? This chapter argues that they do so only indirectly. Our moral equality is most directly grounded in a social practice of equality, a practice that serves the purpose of mitigating our tendencies toward control and domination that interpreters of Rousseau call “inflamed amour-propre.” We qualify as participants in this practice of equality by possessing certain agential capacities, but it is our participation in the practice, and not the capacities themselves, that makes us moral equals. Thus, in contrast with recent accounts that simply posit a threshold above which capacity-variations are ignored, this chapter proposes moving from a capacity-based to a practice-based view of moral equality.
Review of Andrea Sangiovanni, Humanity without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights Ethics (2018)
"The Motives for Moral Credit" Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (2017)
To deserve credit for doing what is morally right, we must act from the right kinds of motives. The right kinds of motives involve responding both to the morally relevant reasons, by acting on these considerations, and to the morally relevant individuals, by being guided by attitudes of respect and care for them. Recent theories of the right kinds of motives have tended to prioritize responding to moral reasons. I develop a theory that instead prioritizes responding to individuals (through attitudes of respect and care for them) and argue that it better accounts for the basic features of the right kinds of motives – what we most fundamentally care about in judging whether others deserve moral credit.
"Side Effects and the Structure of Deliberation" Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (2015)
There is a puzzle about the very possibility of foreseen but unintended side effects, and solving this puzzle requires us to revise our basic picture of the structure of practical deliberation. The puzzle is that, while it seems that we can rationally foresee, but not intend, bringing about foreseen side effects, it also seems that we rationally must decide to bring about foreseen side effects and that we intend to do whatever we decide to do. I propose solving this puzzle by rejecting the idea that we intend to do whatever we decide to do. My solution involves taking account of the underappreciated role that qualified intentions play in deliberation. I also argue that this solution fares better than those that instead reject the idea that we rationally must decide to bring about foreseen side effects, for these solutions are committed to rejecting the even more compelling idea that decisions rationally serve as the conclusions of practical deliberation.
Below I describe some of my works in progress. Feel free to e-mail me if you'd like to see some of this work.
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Work (co-edited with Julian Jonker)
"Corporate Sincerity"
A question about corporate sincerity arises in two kinds of contexts. In accommodation contexts, a corporate agent purports to maintain the sort of reasonable, conscience-constituting normative commitments that would give it a claim to be exempt from a general obligation that applies to it. For its claim to be justified, it must be sincere in holding these commitments. In moral credit contexts, a corporate agent does something that is morally right (or justified), but there is reason to leave open the question of whether it deserves moral credit for having done what is right; this occurs when, e.g., it is accused of reputation washing. Deserving moral credit requires it to have been sincere in having acted rightly. I argue that there is a single substrate of corporate sincerity in both contexts: a corporate agent is sincere when (i) it says or does something that is meant to be understood as expressing certain valuing attitudes and (ii) its statement or action is guided by its realization of the practical functioning of those valuing attitudes.
"Equality as a Social Imperative"
Relational egalitarians have cast an attractive vision of moral equality as something made socially real. But it remains unclear what kind of moral force this vision holds. What sorts of moral demands does relational equality entail, and how do they fall on us as individuals and/or collectives? It also remains unclear what kind of relationality (or sociality) lies at the heart of relational equality. What are the forms of being related by which we can achieve relational equality – as friends, or co-citizens, or by sharing the right “ethos” – and what do they importantly have in common, if anything? While these appear as separate questions, I think we can fruitfully address them together. I propose that the relevant form of relationality is given by social norms: We relate as equals in virtue of sharing egalitarian social norms. And I argue, accordingly, that the moral force of relational equality is that of a social imperative: a moral requirement to instantiate certain social norms. I then show how conceiving of relational equality in terms of morally requisite social norms helps us solve relational egalitarianism’s pervasiveness and non-ideal problems
"Explaining What We Omit and Allow"
For many of our intentional omissions, there seem to be no practical attitudes that can rationalize them. The same is true of many acts of consent. This is a problem, because intentional omissions and acts of consent are taken to be morally significant – for, e.g., assigning moral responsibility and waiving rights – as exercises of intentional agency. If there are no practical attitudes that can rationalize them, they seem to lack the requisite agential credentials. You might give up the search for rationalizing attitudes and try to explain the intentionality of what we omit and allow some other way. But I argue that we should not give up this search, because there is a practical attitude, so far overlooked in these debates, that can widely rationalize both intentional omission and consent. This is an attitude of deliberative bracketing, by which we commit to not giving weight to certain reasons in practical deliberation. I provide an account of the functioning of this attitude, focusing on the kinds of cases that have made it difficult to account for intentional omissions, and I begin extending this account to cover challenging cases of consent.
"Blaming as Equals at Work"
Interpersonal blame typically manifests the “victim’s prerogative” – victims of culpable wrongdoing are protected from censure or criticism of their blame (and its expressions) by wrongdoers. Using the normative lens of relational equality, which rightly has gained traction in normative business ethics scholarship in recent years, I argue that when managers are the victims of culpable employee wrongdoing, they should forego the victim’s prerogative. They should be open to employee censure and criticism of their blame-expressions, including from wrongdoing employees, and this should be supported by workplace norms and procedures. But when employees are the victims of culpable managerial wrongdoing, they should exercise the victim’s prerogative. They should be protected from managerial censure and criticism of their blame-expressions, and this, too, should be supported by workplace norms and procedures. In short, in order for managers and employees to relate as moral equals, there must be an asymmetry in how they blame each other.
Working as Equals: Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace, co-edited with J. Jonker (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Forthcoming and published articles and chapters:
"Organizational Partiality and Relational Equality" Journal of Moral Philosophy (forthcoming)
I critically explore the phenomenon of managerial moral vigilantism, whereby managers use their organizational authority to take the moral law into their own hands, shirking the local, organizational values and aims that pertain to their decision-making for the sake of extra-organizational values and aims. I argue that, in doing so, they fail to treat their employees as moral equals, because they fail to respect the reasonable expectations that employees have about the values and aims that will constrain how organizational authority is wielded over them. In short, moral vigilante managers fail to show the kind of organizational partiality that relational equality requires. My conclusion, then, is that there is a limited kind of organizational partiality required by relational equality, a paradigmatic instance of which concerns how managers (or organizational superiors, more broadly) exercise their organizational authority.
"Corporate Moral Credit" Business Ethics Quarterly (online first)
When do companies deserve credit for doing what is right? This question about corporate moral creditworthiness concerns the positive side of corporate moral responsibility, the negative side of which is the more commonly discussed question of when companies are blameworthy for doing what is wrong. I offer a broadly functionalist account of how companies can act from morally creditworthy motives, in light of a serious challenge to the claim that they can. This challenge is posed by the Strawsonian idea that morally creditworthy motivation involves being guided by moral attitudes of “goodwill” for others, such as respect and care. Given how these attitudes involve affect and/or phenomenal consciousness, it is doubtful that companies can be guided by them. But I show that what matters about being guided by moral attitudes of goodwill is being directly concerned for others, and that such direct concern is achieved by the practical functioning of those attitudes - the roles they play in practical deliberation. Companies can realize this practical functioning through their decision-making and information-gathering procedures without having the affective and/or phenomenal states associated with moral attitudes of goodwill. I also explore how a company’s moral creditworthiness, or lack thereof, should shape our response to it.
"Good Enough for Equality" (forthcoming in Working as Equals volume)
The ideal of relating as equals is, in part, an ideal of virtue – the attitudes and dispositions that support social relations of equality. These are standardly taken to involve accepting the Equal Authority of other persons, giving other persons Equal Consideration, and treating the interests of other persons as having Equal Importance. But why does relational equality involve these attitudes and dispositions, and what exactly do they entail? I aim to make progress on answering these questions by focusing on adult autonomy, using the workplace as an apt setting for exploring the resulting autonomy-focused conception of relational egalitarian virtue. I first consider and reject an interest- focused conception of relational egalitarian virtue, which treats Equal Importance as central. This view allows for a paternalistic stance that is incompatible with social relations of equality. I then develop an autonomy-focused view that treats Equal Authority as central, what I call the “Authority-Centered Relational Egalitarian” virtue (ACRE). ACRE avoids the paternalistic implications of the interest-focused view. I conclude by exploring how managers can sustain and enact ACRE in exercising organizational authority over employees.
"How to Evaluate Managerial Nudges" Journal of Business Ethics (2023) - discussed in the "What Do You Make of This?" podcast and Rebecca Ruehle, "The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace," Business Ethics Quarterly
One reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as rational and/or autonomous (RA). Recent nudge-defenders have marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge their employees, they generally bolster their employees' limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge-critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge-defenders equivocate between two different senses of 'treating someone as RA.' The value-preserving notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to enhance RA capacities is different from the authority-recognizing notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, in order to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers.
"Roles, Rousseau, and Respect for Persons" Social Theory & Practice (2022)
The attitude of respect for persons involves accepting that persons have responsibilities, and not just authority, for making decisions about their lives and interactions with others. I show how we can readily capture this aspect of respect for persons with a role-based view, on which respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing others for a social role they occupy. To fill in a role-based view, we need to describe the practice into which the pertinent role figures and which encompasses all persons. To do this, my account draws on the Rousseauian idea of inflamed amour-propre. Roughly, respect for persons is an attitude of recognizing persons for the role they occupy in a ubiquitous social practice that helps solve the problem of inflamed amour-propre. You might worry that my role-based view compromises the non-contingency and universality of our standing to be respected as persons, but I show how my view preserves the aspects of this moral standing that matter most. I close by suggesting that my role-based view compares favorably to the prevailing “capacity-based” views on which respect for persons recognizes persons for their special agential capacities.
"The Virtues of Relational Equality at Work" Humanistic Management Journal (2022), special issue: "The Future of Work: Promoting Dignity and Human Flourishing")
How important is it for managers to have the “nice” virtues of modesty, civility, and humility? While recent scholarship has tended to focus on the organizational consequences of leaders having or lacking these traits, I want to address the prior, deeper question of whether and how these traits are intrinsically morally important. I argue that certain forms of modesty, civility, and humility have intrinsic importance as the virtues of relational equality – the attitudes and dispositions by which we relate as moral equals. I provide a novel account of the normative grounds of the virtues of relational equality and develop a corresponding framework for how these virtues can be enacted by managers. The virtues are grounded in the importance of dismantling objectionable forms of social hierarchy, which requires relations of equality whereby persons accept that they each have the same personal authority over their lives and interactions. I show how this view of virtue contrasts with the prevailing Aristotelian, Personalist, and Smithian “bourgeois virtue” views in business ethics. I then explain how, for managers, sustaining and enacting the virtues of relational equality involves a distinctive cluster of role-specific traits: respect for employees’ equal personal authority (modesty), a commitment to express such respect (civility), and giving equal weight and deference to employees’ relevant interests (humility).
Review of Suzy Killmister, Contours of Dignity Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2021)
Review of Alex Edmans, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit Business Ethics Quarterly (2021)
"Nudging for Rationality and Self-Governance" Ethics (2020)
Andreas Schmidt argues that ethicists have misplaced moral qualms about nudges insofar as their worries are about whether nudges treat us as rational agents, because nudges can enhance our rational agency. I think that Schmidt is right that nudges often enhance our rational agency; in fact, we can carry his conclusion further: nudges often enhance our self-governing agency, too. But this does not alleviate our worries that nudges fail to treat us as rational. This is shown by disambiguating two conceptions of treating-as-rational. The more plausible conception of treating-as-rational undermines Schmidt’s case that nudges often treat us as rational.
"When Vanity Is Dangerous" Philosophy & Public Affairs (2020)
Unjustifiably expecting a higher form of regard from others than one deserves is a familiar vice; call it the “vanity-vice.” How serious of a vice is it? Rousseau claims that it is uniquely morally dangerous. I show how Rousseau’s claim is true of only one form of the vanity-vice. I first develop an account of dangerous vices that takes seriously Rousseau’s concern about the anti-egalitarian vices associated with inflamed amour-propre. I then apply two, cross-cutting distinctions in vanity: a distinction in whether one cares about the correctness of one’s expectations of high regard, and a distinction in the kind of high regard one expects. When we do not care about the correctness of our inflated expectations of regard, and when the unduly high regard we expect is authority-recognizing deference, we manifest a form of vanity that is uniquely dangerous, what I call “entitled smugness.”
"The Anti-Inflammatory Basis of Equality" Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (2018)
We are moral equals, but in virtue of what? The most plausible answers to this question have pointed to our higher agential capacities, but we vary in the degrees to which we possess those capacities. How could they ground our equal moral standing, then? This chapter argues that they do so only indirectly. Our moral equality is most directly grounded in a social practice of equality, a practice that serves the purpose of mitigating our tendencies toward control and domination that interpreters of Rousseau call “inflamed amour-propre.” We qualify as participants in this practice of equality by possessing certain agential capacities, but it is our participation in the practice, and not the capacities themselves, that makes us moral equals. Thus, in contrast with recent accounts that simply posit a threshold above which capacity-variations are ignored, this chapter proposes moving from a capacity-based to a practice-based view of moral equality.
Review of Andrea Sangiovanni, Humanity without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights Ethics (2018)
"The Motives for Moral Credit" Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (2017)
To deserve credit for doing what is morally right, we must act from the right kinds of motives. The right kinds of motives involve responding both to the morally relevant reasons, by acting on these considerations, and to the morally relevant individuals, by being guided by attitudes of respect and care for them. Recent theories of the right kinds of motives have tended to prioritize responding to moral reasons. I develop a theory that instead prioritizes responding to individuals (through attitudes of respect and care for them) and argue that it better accounts for the basic features of the right kinds of motives – what we most fundamentally care about in judging whether others deserve moral credit.
"Side Effects and the Structure of Deliberation" Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (2015)
There is a puzzle about the very possibility of foreseen but unintended side effects, and solving this puzzle requires us to revise our basic picture of the structure of practical deliberation. The puzzle is that, while it seems that we can rationally foresee, but not intend, bringing about foreseen side effects, it also seems that we rationally must decide to bring about foreseen side effects and that we intend to do whatever we decide to do. I propose solving this puzzle by rejecting the idea that we intend to do whatever we decide to do. My solution involves taking account of the underappreciated role that qualified intentions play in deliberation. I also argue that this solution fares better than those that instead reject the idea that we rationally must decide to bring about foreseen side effects, for these solutions are committed to rejecting the even more compelling idea that decisions rationally serve as the conclusions of practical deliberation.
Below I describe some of my works in progress. Feel free to e-mail me if you'd like to see some of this work.
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Work (co-edited with Julian Jonker)
"Corporate Sincerity"
A question about corporate sincerity arises in two kinds of contexts. In accommodation contexts, a corporate agent purports to maintain the sort of reasonable, conscience-constituting normative commitments that would give it a claim to be exempt from a general obligation that applies to it. For its claim to be justified, it must be sincere in holding these commitments. In moral credit contexts, a corporate agent does something that is morally right (or justified), but there is reason to leave open the question of whether it deserves moral credit for having done what is right; this occurs when, e.g., it is accused of reputation washing. Deserving moral credit requires it to have been sincere in having acted rightly. I argue that there is a single substrate of corporate sincerity in both contexts: a corporate agent is sincere when (i) it says or does something that is meant to be understood as expressing certain valuing attitudes and (ii) its statement or action is guided by its realization of the practical functioning of those valuing attitudes.
"Equality as a Social Imperative"
Relational egalitarians have cast an attractive vision of moral equality as something made socially real. But it remains unclear what kind of moral force this vision holds. What sorts of moral demands does relational equality entail, and how do they fall on us as individuals and/or collectives? It also remains unclear what kind of relationality (or sociality) lies at the heart of relational equality. What are the forms of being related by which we can achieve relational equality – as friends, or co-citizens, or by sharing the right “ethos” – and what do they importantly have in common, if anything? While these appear as separate questions, I think we can fruitfully address them together. I propose that the relevant form of relationality is given by social norms: We relate as equals in virtue of sharing egalitarian social norms. And I argue, accordingly, that the moral force of relational equality is that of a social imperative: a moral requirement to instantiate certain social norms. I then show how conceiving of relational equality in terms of morally requisite social norms helps us solve relational egalitarianism’s pervasiveness and non-ideal problems
"Explaining What We Omit and Allow"
For many of our intentional omissions, there seem to be no practical attitudes that can rationalize them. The same is true of many acts of consent. This is a problem, because intentional omissions and acts of consent are taken to be morally significant – for, e.g., assigning moral responsibility and waiving rights – as exercises of intentional agency. If there are no practical attitudes that can rationalize them, they seem to lack the requisite agential credentials. You might give up the search for rationalizing attitudes and try to explain the intentionality of what we omit and allow some other way. But I argue that we should not give up this search, because there is a practical attitude, so far overlooked in these debates, that can widely rationalize both intentional omission and consent. This is an attitude of deliberative bracketing, by which we commit to not giving weight to certain reasons in practical deliberation. I provide an account of the functioning of this attitude, focusing on the kinds of cases that have made it difficult to account for intentional omissions, and I begin extending this account to cover challenging cases of consent.
"Blaming as Equals at Work"
Interpersonal blame typically manifests the “victim’s prerogative” – victims of culpable wrongdoing are protected from censure or criticism of their blame (and its expressions) by wrongdoers. Using the normative lens of relational equality, which rightly has gained traction in normative business ethics scholarship in recent years, I argue that when managers are the victims of culpable employee wrongdoing, they should forego the victim’s prerogative. They should be open to employee censure and criticism of their blame-expressions, including from wrongdoing employees, and this should be supported by workplace norms and procedures. But when employees are the victims of culpable managerial wrongdoing, they should exercise the victim’s prerogative. They should be protected from managerial censure and criticism of their blame-expressions, and this, too, should be supported by workplace norms and procedures. In short, in order for managers and employees to relate as moral equals, there must be an asymmetry in how they blame each other.