Research Overview
My work explores the relationship between the epistemic and the ethical by addressing the question: How do different kinds of epistemic and ethical goods and virtues enable, constitute, and interfere with each other? Below, I briefly describe my three main lines of research, each of which is devoted to a different aspect of this overarching question.
Epistemic Demandingness and The Web of Virtue
My first project is concerned with the complex web of epistemic ties that binds moral virtues together. In my article “What Knowledge is Necessary for Virtue?” (in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, PDF available under "Articles, Etc."), I consider one infamous implication of the Aristotelian unity of the virtues thesis, namely, that the possessor of one virtue necessarily knows what all the other virtues demand. I argue that while this implication appears absurd, it becomes much more palatable once we recognize that virtues are not all equally tightly bound up with each other. Different kinds of knowledge are variably important to the possession of different virtues, and where there is overlap in different virtues’ knowledge requirements, virtues are drawn together in clusters. Even if the epistemic bar for the full possession of a single virtue is very high, then, one can make a great deal of progress with respect to some virtues without yet grasping truths that are central to other virtue clusters.
In related work currently under revision, I take my characterization of this web further and argue that progress with respect to one moral virtue can actually be abetted by the neglect of truths that lie near the heart of other virtues. Even if ignorance, inattention, and other apparent epistemic vices play no part in virtues’ ideal realization, then, they do at least have a role to play in the fostering of more middling versions of some moral virtues. This observation allows us to make headway in the ongoing debate over whether there are “virtues of ignorance” (virtues that require and centrally involve epistemic fault), because it accommodates many of the intuitions behind the claim that such virtues exist, without requiring the admission that full moral virtue is incompatible with full epistemic virtue.
Right now, I am particularly interested in questions about the value of moral diversity, including diversity of moral outlooks, moral personalities, and/or moral skills. Would our lives necessarily be impoverished if we were all good *in the same way*? Which kinds of moral diversity, if any, should we aim to promote, and which kinds should we aim to eliminate?
Below, some abstracts for works in progress in this domain:
Growing up and getting better: on the price of moral sensibility change
A sensibility is an emotional orientation to the world. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter our overall experience of the world. Sensibility changes are an ordinary and basic part of our development as valuers, but even sensibility changes that constitute all-things-considered improvements in our evaluative outlook come with significant epistemic-cum-moral costs. Here, I will begin to develop an ethics of moral sensibility change. More particularly, I will argue that we can have reason to feel morally ambivalent about the improvement of our own moral sensibilities. I draw out two epistemic costs characteristically involved in moral sensibility change. Firstly, moral sensibility change—even sensibility change that is in a real respect ‘for the better’– can imperil what-its-like knowledge. That risk is morally significant because of the relation between what-it's-like knowledge and compassion. Second, even sensibility change that constitutes an overall improvement to one’s moral-epistemic condition can also at least temporarily compromise one’s appreciation of some morally significant properties. That, too, is a cost that seems worth taking seriously.
Moral sensibilities, moral diversity, and the division of moral labor
This paper argues for the diversity thesis: diversity of moral personality, and more particularly of moral sensibility, is not a regrettable or even evaluatively neutral feature of human life. On the contrary, it is a morally good thing. The morally relevant needs of both individuals and communities are best served not by moral monoculture, wherein individuals share just the same patterns of emotional evaluative construal, but rather by moral polyculture, wherein individuals are disposed to emotionally construe the same situations in importantly different lights. We support the diversity thesis partly through empirically-informed reflection on the nature of attention, and partly through reflection on the constellation of moral needs. One upshot of our analysis is that the moral goodness of an individual’s moral personality cannot be assessed in isolation, since it is at least to some extent a function of what others in their moral community are like.
Empathy
Recently, I've been primarily focused on a single psychological phenomenon, empathy, which I take to be a kind of emotionally-charged imaginative perspective taking. I ask: What exactly do we learn via empathy? And what does that epistemic contribution have to do with our moral capacities? To answer these questions, I turn to David Hume and Adam Smith’s competing visions of empathy’s functions. Hume’s highly influential account of empathy in the Treatise purports to show how empathy erects a bridge between ourselves and others, thereby freeing us from solipsism and egoism. However, the account seems to pit empathy’s supposed epistemic and motivational functions against each other. Smith’s account features some problematic echoes of Hume's approach, but it also goes beyond it in an important way. I argue that Smith’s discussion of the connection between empathy and judgment points toward a very different, more promising picture of empathy’s functions and worth. I develop that picture by arguing that when we empathize with another person, we cannot fail to appreciate the intelligibility of the other’s original emotion first-hand. This appreciation, empathy’s distinctive epistemic good, constitutes humane understanding of the other’s emotion. I also show that humane understanding is morally significant in multiple respects. It serves as the unique antidote to a form of painful isolation, wards off certain kinds of cruelty, and functions as central means by which we enrich and extend our sense of evaluative properties’ contours.
Six articles and chapters that form part of this project are currently in print or forthcoming: “Empathy and testimonial trust” (in the Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements), “Empathy, concern, and understanding in The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (in The Adam Smith Review), "Empathy and the value of humane understanding" (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), "Empathy with vicious perspectives? A puzzle about the moral limits of empathetic imagination" (in Synthese), "Empathy, sensibility, and the novelist’s imagination" (in The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition), and "Sophie de Grouchy on sympathy, economic inequality, and the corruption of moral sentiments" (in The Empathetic Emotions in the History of Philosophy). Abstracts for and PDFs of these articles are all available under "Articles, Etc." My ongoing work on empathy includes both scholarly papers in the history of early modern philosophy and papers that fall more squarely in the field of contemporary moral psychology. Below, I detail a few papers in progress. These are self-standing, but they also constitute the groundwork for my eventual book-length treatment of the subject. Drafts may be available, email me at obailey(at)berkeley.edu. I always welcome and am grateful for feedback on my work!
Hume and Smith on the Virtue of Humanity
The moralists of the Scottish Enlightenment took themselves to be echoing a common sentiment in assigning to humanity a central place in the pantheon of virtues. But what, exactly, does the virtue of humanity consist in? I explore two answers to this question, one from Hume and one from Adam Smith. The Humean humane person is simply a person who is disposed to feel and act upon a strong preference for the happiness of others, a preference that is actuated by an unusually vivid and expansive awareness of others’ pain or pleasure. The Smithean humane person, by contrast, is required to skillfully and readily grasp the fittingness of others’ pain at their own misfortune, and of others’ pleasure at their own successes. Smithean humanity, then, involves something above and beyond the benevolence that is the focus of the Humean account. It centrally involves a recognition of the other as a being attuned to the world’s evaluative features.
Sympathy and altruism in Treatise 2.2.9.14-17
An analysis of the link Hume traces between sympathy and altruism at Treatise 2.2.9.14–17 (SBN 388). This section of the Treatise tends to be neglected because it is so frustratingly jumbled. However, a careful reconstruction of it can effectively reveal a flaw in the heart of Hume’s theory that recurs in some of the most prominent contemporary analyses of empathy’s functions.
Moral luck and the demands of humanity
Adam Smith says some contradictory things about moral luck. He claims that it is good and necessary that we blame people for the unintended and unforeseen bad consequences of their non-negligent actions, because "man is made for action," but then he seems to reverse himself at the last moment, claiming instead that every humane person should attempt to fully enter into the position of the inadvertent offender, and empathize with his frustration at being so blamed. Because Smith's theory ties empathy and judgment so tightly together, it seems to leave little to no space for us to empathize with a person's frustration at being blamed, while still blaming them or even just judging them to be blameworthy. I explore these questions: Must we understand Smith to have contradicted himself, here, as some interpreters have concluded? Is Smith suggesting that "our" moral outlook is somehow less than fully incoherent, and that that is a good thing? And if Smith *is* making that suggestion, what bearing does that have on his invocation of reflexive endorsement as a source of normativity?
Empathy, Extremism, and Epistemic Autonomy
Are extremists (incels, neo-nazis, and the like) answerable for their convictions? Quassim Cassam has recently argued that while political extremists do exhibit unusual patterns of thought and feeling, their evaluative beliefs are generally not the product of brainwashing, of blind deference, or of extreme poverty of information. Extremists are, therefore, epistemically autonomous. They are answerable for their beliefs, and consequently it is appropriate to offer them reasoned arguments, not “support" or "advice.” I grant that the once-popular characterization of extremists as cripplingly epistemically dependent is empirically inadequate. However, epistemic independence does not guarantee epistemic autonomy. Extremists may be fiercely committed to epistemic independence, but that commitment is characteristically (and non-accidentally) paired with severe deficiencies in empathic orientation. Severe deficiencies in empathic orientation undermine extremists’ ability to adequately engage with competing evaluative perspectives, and thus compromise extremists’ epistemic autonomy. I consider the practical upshots of this conclusion. First, I ask how it should inform our thinking about what we owe to extremists. Second, I consider the implications for non-extremists: do we need to empathize with extremists in order to protect or promote our own epistemic autonomy?
Conscience
I anticipate that my work on empathy will occupy me for quite some time. Looking beyond it, though, my next primary project will be devoted to conscience. Like empathy, conscience has been regarded as something of a moral and epistemic Swiss Army knife: it is supposed to be the seat of our truest self and the key to our integrity, a source of moral knowledge, and a motivating force. Is there in fact a single faculty that can perform these functions, and if so, could it be the kind of thing we have in mind when we talk about the “voice” of conscience? This appealing metaphor seems to require a real distinction between the one who speaks and the one who hears and responds. It is natural to think both that I listen to my conscience, and that my conscience is also (in some sense) me, but it is not obvious how one could learn anything by listening to oneself. Nor is it clear how the idea of an internal division between speaker and hearer can be reconciled with the tradition of binding conscience and integrity closely together.
Another dimension of my project concerns the moral import of being motivated by one’s conscience. Smith reasonably suggests that people of merely common virtue should be wary of the motivational pull of conscience for epistemic reasons; their imperfectly formed conscience could lead them astray. But it is not clear that motivation by conscience is proper for the truly morally excellent, either, because conscience motivates at least in part by imposing the threat of painful censure, and it seems like a desire to avoid internal censure should not be part of the exceptionally virtuous person’s motivation to do what is right and good.
In pursuing answers to the puzzles I’ve just voiced, I will primarily engage with the work of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (along with Bishop Butler, an English philosopher whose work significantly influenced Hume, Smith, and Reid). These philosophers share two qualities that make their work particularly valuable to my own. First, their epistemic and ethical theories are sensitive to our nature as emotional, imperfectly rational creatures whose abilities are profoundly shaped by our social conditions. That sensitivity is important for me because I am not just concerned with the work that empathy and conscience could do for us if our psychological shortcomings were remedied and if our social circumstances were ideal. I’m interested in their epistemic and moral significance under realistic conditions, with biases, insensitivities, and constraining social structures in play. Second, these philosophers tend to take the details of our mundane experience seriously. I think that orientation is very helpful for uncovering exactly how key features of our inner lives like empathy and conscience matter, and it is one I have also sought out in choosing other resources to draw upon. For example, my dissertation makes use of E.M. Forster, George Eliot, and the early phenomenologists Max Scheler and Edith Stein– authors who are all temporally well removed from Hume and Smith, but who share with them a keen eye for social and emotional nuance.
Epistemic Demandingness and The Web of Virtue
My first project is concerned with the complex web of epistemic ties that binds moral virtues together. In my article “What Knowledge is Necessary for Virtue?” (in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, PDF available under "Articles, Etc."), I consider one infamous implication of the Aristotelian unity of the virtues thesis, namely, that the possessor of one virtue necessarily knows what all the other virtues demand. I argue that while this implication appears absurd, it becomes much more palatable once we recognize that virtues are not all equally tightly bound up with each other. Different kinds of knowledge are variably important to the possession of different virtues, and where there is overlap in different virtues’ knowledge requirements, virtues are drawn together in clusters. Even if the epistemic bar for the full possession of a single virtue is very high, then, one can make a great deal of progress with respect to some virtues without yet grasping truths that are central to other virtue clusters.
In related work currently under revision, I take my characterization of this web further and argue that progress with respect to one moral virtue can actually be abetted by the neglect of truths that lie near the heart of other virtues. Even if ignorance, inattention, and other apparent epistemic vices play no part in virtues’ ideal realization, then, they do at least have a role to play in the fostering of more middling versions of some moral virtues. This observation allows us to make headway in the ongoing debate over whether there are “virtues of ignorance” (virtues that require and centrally involve epistemic fault), because it accommodates many of the intuitions behind the claim that such virtues exist, without requiring the admission that full moral virtue is incompatible with full epistemic virtue.
Right now, I am particularly interested in questions about the value of moral diversity, including diversity of moral outlooks, moral personalities, and/or moral skills. Would our lives necessarily be impoverished if we were all good *in the same way*? Which kinds of moral diversity, if any, should we aim to promote, and which kinds should we aim to eliminate?
Below, some abstracts for works in progress in this domain:
Growing up and getting better: on the price of moral sensibility change
A sensibility is an emotional orientation to the world. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter our overall experience of the world. Sensibility changes are an ordinary and basic part of our development as valuers, but even sensibility changes that constitute all-things-considered improvements in our evaluative outlook come with significant epistemic-cum-moral costs. Here, I will begin to develop an ethics of moral sensibility change. More particularly, I will argue that we can have reason to feel morally ambivalent about the improvement of our own moral sensibilities. I draw out two epistemic costs characteristically involved in moral sensibility change. Firstly, moral sensibility change—even sensibility change that is in a real respect ‘for the better’– can imperil what-its-like knowledge. That risk is morally significant because of the relation between what-it's-like knowledge and compassion. Second, even sensibility change that constitutes an overall improvement to one’s moral-epistemic condition can also at least temporarily compromise one’s appreciation of some morally significant properties. That, too, is a cost that seems worth taking seriously.
Moral sensibilities, moral diversity, and the division of moral labor
This paper argues for the diversity thesis: diversity of moral personality, and more particularly of moral sensibility, is not a regrettable or even evaluatively neutral feature of human life. On the contrary, it is a morally good thing. The morally relevant needs of both individuals and communities are best served not by moral monoculture, wherein individuals share just the same patterns of emotional evaluative construal, but rather by moral polyculture, wherein individuals are disposed to emotionally construe the same situations in importantly different lights. We support the diversity thesis partly through empirically-informed reflection on the nature of attention, and partly through reflection on the constellation of moral needs. One upshot of our analysis is that the moral goodness of an individual’s moral personality cannot be assessed in isolation, since it is at least to some extent a function of what others in their moral community are like.
Empathy
Recently, I've been primarily focused on a single psychological phenomenon, empathy, which I take to be a kind of emotionally-charged imaginative perspective taking. I ask: What exactly do we learn via empathy? And what does that epistemic contribution have to do with our moral capacities? To answer these questions, I turn to David Hume and Adam Smith’s competing visions of empathy’s functions. Hume’s highly influential account of empathy in the Treatise purports to show how empathy erects a bridge between ourselves and others, thereby freeing us from solipsism and egoism. However, the account seems to pit empathy’s supposed epistemic and motivational functions against each other. Smith’s account features some problematic echoes of Hume's approach, but it also goes beyond it in an important way. I argue that Smith’s discussion of the connection between empathy and judgment points toward a very different, more promising picture of empathy’s functions and worth. I develop that picture by arguing that when we empathize with another person, we cannot fail to appreciate the intelligibility of the other’s original emotion first-hand. This appreciation, empathy’s distinctive epistemic good, constitutes humane understanding of the other’s emotion. I also show that humane understanding is morally significant in multiple respects. It serves as the unique antidote to a form of painful isolation, wards off certain kinds of cruelty, and functions as central means by which we enrich and extend our sense of evaluative properties’ contours.
Six articles and chapters that form part of this project are currently in print or forthcoming: “Empathy and testimonial trust” (in the Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements), “Empathy, concern, and understanding in The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (in The Adam Smith Review), "Empathy and the value of humane understanding" (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), "Empathy with vicious perspectives? A puzzle about the moral limits of empathetic imagination" (in Synthese), "Empathy, sensibility, and the novelist’s imagination" (in The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition), and "Sophie de Grouchy on sympathy, economic inequality, and the corruption of moral sentiments" (in The Empathetic Emotions in the History of Philosophy). Abstracts for and PDFs of these articles are all available under "Articles, Etc." My ongoing work on empathy includes both scholarly papers in the history of early modern philosophy and papers that fall more squarely in the field of contemporary moral psychology. Below, I detail a few papers in progress. These are self-standing, but they also constitute the groundwork for my eventual book-length treatment of the subject. Drafts may be available, email me at obailey(at)berkeley.edu. I always welcome and am grateful for feedback on my work!
Hume and Smith on the Virtue of Humanity
The moralists of the Scottish Enlightenment took themselves to be echoing a common sentiment in assigning to humanity a central place in the pantheon of virtues. But what, exactly, does the virtue of humanity consist in? I explore two answers to this question, one from Hume and one from Adam Smith. The Humean humane person is simply a person who is disposed to feel and act upon a strong preference for the happiness of others, a preference that is actuated by an unusually vivid and expansive awareness of others’ pain or pleasure. The Smithean humane person, by contrast, is required to skillfully and readily grasp the fittingness of others’ pain at their own misfortune, and of others’ pleasure at their own successes. Smithean humanity, then, involves something above and beyond the benevolence that is the focus of the Humean account. It centrally involves a recognition of the other as a being attuned to the world’s evaluative features.
Sympathy and altruism in Treatise 2.2.9.14-17
An analysis of the link Hume traces between sympathy and altruism at Treatise 2.2.9.14–17 (SBN 388). This section of the Treatise tends to be neglected because it is so frustratingly jumbled. However, a careful reconstruction of it can effectively reveal a flaw in the heart of Hume’s theory that recurs in some of the most prominent contemporary analyses of empathy’s functions.
Moral luck and the demands of humanity
Adam Smith says some contradictory things about moral luck. He claims that it is good and necessary that we blame people for the unintended and unforeseen bad consequences of their non-negligent actions, because "man is made for action," but then he seems to reverse himself at the last moment, claiming instead that every humane person should attempt to fully enter into the position of the inadvertent offender, and empathize with his frustration at being so blamed. Because Smith's theory ties empathy and judgment so tightly together, it seems to leave little to no space for us to empathize with a person's frustration at being blamed, while still blaming them or even just judging them to be blameworthy. I explore these questions: Must we understand Smith to have contradicted himself, here, as some interpreters have concluded? Is Smith suggesting that "our" moral outlook is somehow less than fully incoherent, and that that is a good thing? And if Smith *is* making that suggestion, what bearing does that have on his invocation of reflexive endorsement as a source of normativity?
Empathy, Extremism, and Epistemic Autonomy
Are extremists (incels, neo-nazis, and the like) answerable for their convictions? Quassim Cassam has recently argued that while political extremists do exhibit unusual patterns of thought and feeling, their evaluative beliefs are generally not the product of brainwashing, of blind deference, or of extreme poverty of information. Extremists are, therefore, epistemically autonomous. They are answerable for their beliefs, and consequently it is appropriate to offer them reasoned arguments, not “support" or "advice.” I grant that the once-popular characterization of extremists as cripplingly epistemically dependent is empirically inadequate. However, epistemic independence does not guarantee epistemic autonomy. Extremists may be fiercely committed to epistemic independence, but that commitment is characteristically (and non-accidentally) paired with severe deficiencies in empathic orientation. Severe deficiencies in empathic orientation undermine extremists’ ability to adequately engage with competing evaluative perspectives, and thus compromise extremists’ epistemic autonomy. I consider the practical upshots of this conclusion. First, I ask how it should inform our thinking about what we owe to extremists. Second, I consider the implications for non-extremists: do we need to empathize with extremists in order to protect or promote our own epistemic autonomy?
Conscience
I anticipate that my work on empathy will occupy me for quite some time. Looking beyond it, though, my next primary project will be devoted to conscience. Like empathy, conscience has been regarded as something of a moral and epistemic Swiss Army knife: it is supposed to be the seat of our truest self and the key to our integrity, a source of moral knowledge, and a motivating force. Is there in fact a single faculty that can perform these functions, and if so, could it be the kind of thing we have in mind when we talk about the “voice” of conscience? This appealing metaphor seems to require a real distinction between the one who speaks and the one who hears and responds. It is natural to think both that I listen to my conscience, and that my conscience is also (in some sense) me, but it is not obvious how one could learn anything by listening to oneself. Nor is it clear how the idea of an internal division between speaker and hearer can be reconciled with the tradition of binding conscience and integrity closely together.
Another dimension of my project concerns the moral import of being motivated by one’s conscience. Smith reasonably suggests that people of merely common virtue should be wary of the motivational pull of conscience for epistemic reasons; their imperfectly formed conscience could lead them astray. But it is not clear that motivation by conscience is proper for the truly morally excellent, either, because conscience motivates at least in part by imposing the threat of painful censure, and it seems like a desire to avoid internal censure should not be part of the exceptionally virtuous person’s motivation to do what is right and good.
In pursuing answers to the puzzles I’ve just voiced, I will primarily engage with the work of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (along with Bishop Butler, an English philosopher whose work significantly influenced Hume, Smith, and Reid). These philosophers share two qualities that make their work particularly valuable to my own. First, their epistemic and ethical theories are sensitive to our nature as emotional, imperfectly rational creatures whose abilities are profoundly shaped by our social conditions. That sensitivity is important for me because I am not just concerned with the work that empathy and conscience could do for us if our psychological shortcomings were remedied and if our social circumstances were ideal. I’m interested in their epistemic and moral significance under realistic conditions, with biases, insensitivities, and constraining social structures in play. Second, these philosophers tend to take the details of our mundane experience seriously. I think that orientation is very helpful for uncovering exactly how key features of our inner lives like empathy and conscience matter, and it is one I have also sought out in choosing other resources to draw upon. For example, my dissertation makes use of E.M. Forster, George Eliot, and the early phenomenologists Max Scheler and Edith Stein– authors who are all temporally well removed from Hume and Smith, but who share with them a keen eye for social and emotional nuance.