Research

My research is often synergistic: it brings together conversations and perspectives from various fields (within and outside) of philosophy to help contribute to ongoing philosophical discussions. Though I write on diverse topics within ethics and epistemology, a guiding concern through all my work is better understanding how empirical research can help us in our ethical and epistemological theorizing: figuring out how the descriptive is’s should shape and constrain the normative oughts.

Journal Publications	Abstract
“Nunchi, Ritual, and Early Confucian Ethics.” 2019. Dao 18(1) 23-40.	A central challenge for early Confucian ethics, which relies heavily on the moral rules, scripts, and instructions of ritual, is to provide an account of how best to deviate from ritual when unexpected circumstances demand that one must do so. Many commentators have explored ways in which the Confucian tradition can meet this challenge, and one particularly interesting line of response to it focuses on “mind-reading”—the ability to infer others’ mental states from their behavior. In this article, I introduce nunchi 눈치, a Korean word meaning a keen social awareness and facility in dynamic social situations, and make the case that it represents a key component in a full account of how to best deviate from ritual.
“Korean Nunchi and Well-Being.” 2019. Science, Religion, and Culture 6(1): 103-100. Special Issue Eds. Owen Flanagan and Wenqing Zhao.	“Nunchi” is a Korean term that indicates an expert facility in social interactions and especially the ability to interpret and utilize indirect communication with ease and alacrity. In this paper, I introduce and discuss the concept of nunchi with a focus on two main senses in which it is used: as a skill and as a burden. Then, I discuss the relation of nunchi to well-being and flourishing, both in specifically Korean cultural contexts and in social contexts more generally. Finally, I argue that because of nunchi’s close relation to well-being and flourishing, that there is a strong case to be made for treating it as a virtue.
“Power, Situation, and Character: A Confucian-Inspired Response to Indirect Situationist Critiques.” 2018. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2) 341-358.	Indirect situationist critiques of virtue ethics grant that virtue exists and is possible to acquire, but contend that given the low probability of success in acquiring it, a person genuinely interested in behaving as morally as possible would do better to rely on situationist strategies – or, in other words, strategies of environmental or ecological engineering or control. In this paper, I develop a partial answer to this critique drawn from work in early Confucian ethics and in contemporary philosophy and psychology. From early Confucian ethics, I lean on the concept of li, or ritual. Ritual represents both a set of situational manipulations that are especially effective at directly producing moral behavior and at indirectly cultivating virtue over time, and also a virtue that consists of facility with and expertise in these situational manipulations. Appealing to the particular example of social power, I then argue that one is justified in attempting to acquire virtue if one knows that one will frequently encounter circumstances in which purely situationist strategies lose effectiveness, if these circumstances also carry moral urgency: the risk of great harm or opportunity for great benefit to others is high, and if utilizing the potent combination of situationist strategies and virtue envisioned by the early Confucians as ritual is possible.
“Similarity and Enjoyment: Predicting Continuation for Women in Philosophy.” Heather Demarest, Seth Robertson, Megan Haggard, Madeline Martin-Seaver, and Jewelle Bickel, 2017. Analysis 77 (3) 525-541.	On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions.

Book Chapters
“Constructing Morality with Mengzi: Three Lessons on the Metaethics of Moral Progress.” Seth Robertson and Jing Hu, 2020. In Comparative Metaethics: Neglected Perspectives on the Foundations of Morality. Ed. Colin Marshal, Routledge.

Dissertation

Abstract

Character and Moral Judgment: Designing Right and Wrong. 2019. Chair: Nancy Snow.

I develop a novel constructivist metaethical and normative ethical view by arguing that we should think of ethical theorizing as a design project, akin to architectural, landscape, or user interface design. The upshot of this view for moral philosophy is that we should adjust how we evaluate ethical theories: many considerations for theory evaluation gain or lose weight on this framework. I explore in detail one major implication for this way of doing ethics and argue that it exposes a serious flaw in most familiar normative theories of rightness. Specifically, I argue that, among the considerations that the best designed theories of rightness should capture, there are two that nearly no major ethical view captures simultaneously. The first is a consequentialist consideration, that the rightness or wrongness of some (but not all) acts should be wholly determined by their consequences on welfare. The second is a character consideration, that the rightness or wrongness of some (but not all) acts should be partially but not wholly determined by the particular moral character of the person who committed them.

Selected Conference Presentations	Abstract
“To Cherish What We Ought: A Confucian Ethic of Cherishing.” 2020. APA Eastern Division (ACPA) Panel on “Music, Knowledge, and Virtue: Interpretations and Criticisms of Confucian Philosophy.”	It is widely recognized that the Analects pays special attention to what we might think of as the simple goods of everyday life such as family, friends, learning, and study. In this paper, I introduce and sketch an ethical theory aimed at capturing this emphasis. This theory, an ethic of cherishing, is grounded and guided by the goal of best providing, sustaining, and maintaining access to the goods in life that we ought to cherish. I explain several features of an ethic of cherishing that could be attractive to contemporary moral philosophers as well as several ways in which the interpretive paradigm of an ethic of cherishing helps illuminate and elucidate important aspects of early Confucian moral theory.
“Rhetorical Injustice A Field Guide.” 2019. Bled Philosophical Conference Social Epistemology and the Politics of Knowing.	In this paper, I briefly introduce the concept of rhetorical injustice and outline its three major categories (restricted, unrestricted, and extreme), and then discuss ways in which rhetorical and epistemic injustice intersect, and how an understanding of each helpfully informs the other. Rather than being centered primarily on the wrong done to a knower via her social identity, rhetorical injustice is centered on the wrong done via particular rhetorical positions in rhetorical spaces. Rhetorical injustice occurs when, in the space of public reason-giving, certain rhetorical positions are given more or less credibility, qua rhetorical position, than they deserve in ways that constitute or significantly contribute to an injustice: when the perspectives, claims, reasons, and arguments that would help us identify, expose, interpret, analyze and thus understand, eliminate, and repair injustices are systemically weakened or closed off. The framework I provide for understanding rhetorical injustice is aimed especially at better understanding ways in which the technologies of political propaganda and manipulation are evolving, and this paper explores some of the most important implications of rhetorical injustice for epistemologists studying the social and political dimensions of knowledge.
“How Social Models of Disability Support Mengzi’s Criticisms of Impartial Care.” 2018. APA Central Division, ISCP Panel on Chinese Philosophy and Public Life.	Mengzi’s criticisms of Mohism in the Mengzi (e.g.3A5, 7A26) are, for interpreters of the text, tantalizingly undeveloped. We wonder, for example, exactly what the arguments are and exactly what they imply, what Mengzi’s understanding of Mohist impartial care was, and how correct that understanding was.[1] One major and natural strand of interpretation is that Mengzi’s criticism of Mohism (or at least, one of his criticisms) is grounded in claims about our moral psychology: given our human moral psychology, we somehow cannot meet the moral demands that Mohism places on us. In this paper, I explore this line of reasoning in light of work in and on disabilities studies and the philosophy of disability, and specifically social models of disability. One key insight that comes out of this work (and discussions of it) is that, when left uninformed and untrained, we easily make large mistakes about the subjective well-being of others, often by imagining it through the lens of our beliefs about our own subjective well-being. Thus even though I genuinely care and am concerned about the well-being of a disabled person, that care might manifest in support for policies that are rooted more in my fears of becoming similarly disabled than in alleviating the very fixable frustrations, annoyances, and insults felt by those who experience disabilities. This suggests an argument that, though Mengzi did not provide, would be consistent with his overall view: that even when we act out of genuine concern or care for others, we might make important mistakes in attempting to help others. If this empirical claim is true, then it suggests a moral theory along the lines that Mengzi develops could be more successful in actual situations than a moral theory along the lines of the one that Mengzi criticizes.
“Revenge and Exemplarist Virtue Theory: Three Arguments Not to Make.” 2017. APA Central Division, Main Program.	According to Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist virtue theory, we identify moral exemplars via the emotion of admiration, and vet them through a process of reflection. In this essay, I argue that the ubiquity of admiration for vengeful exemplars raises a challenge for exemplarist virtue theory: it seems to commit Zagzebski to the controversial claim that some vengeful exemplars are moral exemplars. I present three initially plausible responses to this line of argument and contend that each does more to undermine exemplarist virtue theory than to support it.