---

My academic work focuses primarily on issues in normative ethics and analytic feminism, concentrating largely on the moral obligations that arise in oppressive social conditions.  My other interests include feminism in the liberal political tradition, oppression studies, Kantian ethics and practical philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love.

Most of my academic publications can be found on PhilPapers.  Please feel free to contact me if you can't access them there.

Here's my GoogleScholar profile.

---

Selected Academic Publications

Ethics for Everyone, eds. Carol Hay & Julinna Oxley (W.W. Norton & Co., forthcoming)

"Kant on Sex & Gender," Oxford Handbook of Kant, eds. Anil Gomes & Andrew Stephenson (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

• Abstract:  Kant’s views on the differences between men and women, and his related views on sexual morality, are often taken to be some of the most misguided, parochial, and outdated elements of his philosophical system.  His biography as a committed bachelor is frequently mined to paint a picture of a boring, asexual nerd, feeding a caricature whose enduring popularity is likely not unconnected to its ability to bolster the familiar critical rejection of the Kantian moral framework as impersonal, hyper-rationalist, and hostile to both the body and the emotions.  However, untangling what Kant’s views on sex and gender actually are—from both the ad hominem caricatures of the man, and from how his work has (sometimes mistakenly) been taken up by others—yields a discussion that sheds new light on Kant’s views on human nature in general and his practical philosophy in particular.  I’ll argue that while Kant’s views on sex and gender are not unproblematic, Kant’s influence on contemporary understandings of sexual morality—particularly his views on the potential moral pitfalls of sexual objectification, and on the moral importance of sexual consent—deserves recognition.   

“Radical Kantian Rational Reconstruction,” Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, eds. Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (Routledge, 2024)

• Abstract:  In this paper I identify, and consider the relative merits of, two distinct strategies of Kantian rational reconstruction. (1) Apologist rational reconstruction dismisses Kant’s oppressive statements as permissibly ignorable – either mere products of their time, or appearing in works deemed canonically peripheral. It thereby aims to reconstruct a relatively straightforward account of what Kant should have said, by his own lights, that is useful for the purposes of contemporary liberatory social movements. (2) Radical rational reconstruction, on the other hand, takes seriously the possibility that Kant’s oppressive statements ramify throughout his work, and consciously attends to the distinctive experiences of those who are oppressed. It thereby aims to shift the problems Kantian theorists take up, reorient conventional Kantian tenets, and, ultimately, reconstruct new Kantian frameworks capable of exposing and ameliorating oppressive injustices.  Ultimately defending the latter strategy, I argue that oppression theory has as much to teach Kantianism as the other way around.

"Kant on Moral Dilemmas," Radicalizing Kantianism? special issue of Kantian Review, eds. Charles Mills & Corey Dyck (2022).

• Abstract:  The standard attribution of ought implies can rules out the possibility of Kantianism permitting the existence of moral dilemmas. Against this, I argue that Kantianism both can and should permit the existence of moral dilemmas. This new take on moral dilemmas should be of particular urgency to those hoping to radicalize Kant, I argue, because the work of oppression theorists shows that moral dilemmas are particularly likely to strike those who are already most vulnerable. The insights of oppression theory also suggest that the heretofore overlooked social and political implications of moral dilemmas are just as philosophically significant as the metaethical and ethical implications.

"Kant & Arendt on the Challenges of Good Sex & the Temptations of Bad Sex," co-authored with Helga Varden, Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, ed. David Boonin (Palgrave, 2021). 

• Abstract:  This paper considers why a good sexual life tends to be so challenging, and why the temptation to settle for a bad one can be so alluring. We engage these questions by cultivating ideas found in the traditions of feminist philosophy and the philosophy of sex and love in dialogue with the work of two unlikely canonical bedfellows—Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. Some sources of these challenges, we propose, are patterned in that they involve trying to transform, develop, and integrate certain unruly emotional structures in oneself, including together with others. Other patterned sources track inherited oppressive behaviors and feelings that make emotionally healthy, morally responsible realizations of sexuality difficult. Despite these difficulties, striving for a satisfying sexual life can be a meaningful and exciting part of a good human life.

"Review of Helga Varden's Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory," SGIR Review  4:1-2 (2021): 59-67. 

"How Privilege Structures Pandemic Narratives," APA Newsletter on Feminism & Philosophy 20 (2020): 7-12.

• Abstract: A common early narrative that arose as people struggled to cope with their new lives under COVID-19 centered on a platitude about the pandemic being “the great leveler.” But the pretense that we are equally vulnerable—or that we’re “alone together” across lines of race, gender, and class—was a comforting lie. Chronicling the timeline of media talking points seen over the past few months, I argue that social privilege continues to structure the narratives many people use to process life under the pandemic, even while material conditions are much worse for those not in charge of these narratives. At the same time, however, I argue that the pandemic might be setting the stage for genuinely new collective responses to social inequalities, including the long-overdue uprisings inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.​​​

"Kant on the Value of Animals & Other Non-Intrinsically Valuable Things," Kant on Animals, eds. Lucy Allais & John Callanan (Oxford University Press, 2020). 

• Abstract:  With Kant, I argue that intrinsic value is necessarily connected to the rational ability people have to value things.  Because animals do not have this ability they cannot have intrinsic value. This means that if animals are to have any value at all, their value must be non-intrinsic. But, I argue, we can affirm the basic Kantian story about the loci and sources of both intrinsic and non-intrinsic value and still say that animals matter morally, that their interests must be taken into account, that they are moral patients or subjects, and that they deserve genuine moral consideration or regard.

"Gross Violations," The Moral Psychology of Disgust, eds. Nina Strohminger & Victor Kumar (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

• Abstract:  When should we listen to our guts and when should we ignore them?  What makes disgust and other related emotions morally relevant in some situations but not others?  In this paper, I argue that emotions are morally relevant only when they are backed up by reasons and arguments.  ​

"Resisting Oppression Revisited," Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism, ed. Pieranna Garavaso (Bloomsbury, 2018): 483-506.

• Abstract:  Coming more than a decade after I first argued that people who are oppressed have an obligation to resist their oppression, this paper expands the implications of the original account and connects it up to some of the important contemporary work published in oppression studies in the interim.  I then move on to respond to two critical objections to my view.  The first objection charges that the typical severity of oppressive harms is not sufficiently great to ground a general obligation of resistance.  The second objection charges that this project would do better to conceive of resistance in political, rather than moral, terms.

​"Philosophy of Feminism," Philosophy: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies, ed. Donald M. Borchert (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2016).

"Integrity: The Peculiar, The Arbitrary, & the Different," International Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2014): 71-88.

• Abstract:  This paper attempts to address certain shortcomings in the various accounts of the virtue of integrity that appear in the philosophical literature.  Specifically, most analyses of integrity fail to give an adequate account of cases where we might want to attribute integrity to certain aspects of a person’s life but refrain from attributing integrity to his or her life as a whole.  They also fail to give an adequate account of what we are to say about the integrity of people with peculiar or arbitrary commitments.  Attending to these shortcomings will shed new light on an issue that has received considerably more philosophical attention: the question of how we are to judge the reasonableness of others’ conceptions of the good, particularly when these conceptions are radically different from our own.  ​​

"Respect-Worthiness & Dignity," Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 51 (2013): 1–26.

• Abstract:  In this paper I consider the possibility that failing to fulfill the Kantian obligation to protect one’s rational nature might actually vitiate future instances of this obligation. I respond to this dilemma by defending a novel interpretation of Kant’s views on the relation between the value we have and the respect we are owed. I argue, contra the received view among Kant scholars, that the feature in virtue of which someone has unconditional and incomparable value is not the same feature in virtue of which she is owed the respect that constrains how she may be treated. So, even though someone who fails to attempt to protect her rational nature fails to respect herself in the right way, and even though this moral failing does make her lose a certain kind of value, her obligations to respect herself do not go away. ​

"The Obligation to Resist Oppression," Journal of Social Philosophy 42 (2011): 21-45.

• Abstract:  I argue that, in addition to having an obligation to resist the oppression of others, people have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression.  This obligation to oneself, I argue, is grounded in a Kantian duty of self-respect.

• reprinted in The Philosophy of Love & Sex, eds. Carol Hay & Clancy Martin (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023).
• reprinted in Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology, 2nd ed., eds. Ann Cudd, Esa Díaz-León, & Robin Andreasen (Blackwell, forthcoming). 

"On Whether to Ignore Them & Spin: Moral Obligations to Resist Sexual Harassment," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20 (2005): 94-108.

• Abstract:  I consider the question of whether women have an obligation to confront the men who  sexually harass them.  A reluctance to be guilty of blaming the victims of harassment, coupled with other normative considerations that tell in favour of the unfairness of this sort of obligation, might make us think that women never have an obligation to confront their harassers.  But I argue that women do have this obligation and that it is not overridden by many of the considerations that can override other obligations to confront wrongdoers.