•  452
    Humanism: A Reconsideration
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-20. forthcoming.
    Humanism is the view that people treat others inhumanely when we fail to see them as human beings, so that our treatment of them will tend to be more humane when we (fully) see their humanity. Recently, humanist views have been criticized on the grounds that the perpetrators of inhumanity regard their victims as human and treat them inhumanely partly for this reason. I argue that the two most common objections to humanist views (and their relatives) are unpersuasive: not only does the evidence m…Read more
  •  205
    I extend my account of social invisibility and interpersonal recognition by applying it to one form of racism: racial alienation—the failure to emotionally identify with members of another racial group on the basis of their race. I argue that leading views of racism in the analytic tradition threaten to contravene the conviction that racial alienation involves a misrecognition of the other group’s humanity. The pitfall is best avoided by developing a conception of interpersonal awareness that is…Read more
  •  170
    Interpersonal Invisibility and the Recognition of Other Persons
    In David Kaspar (ed.), Explorations in Ethics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 219-242. 2020.
    I argue that we get an account of social invisibility that best fits our practice of moral complaint if we reject orthodoxy and accept a quite different view of what it is to see another person as a person. On my view, seeing a person as a person is inseparable from caring about her in person-specific ways—hence from a disposition to a range of interpersonal emotional responses to her point of view. Thus, a person’s humanity is invisible to us, according to this picture, when we are unreceptive …Read more
  •  113
    The standard of care in the United States favors stabilizing any adult who arrives in an emergency department after a failed suicide attempt, even if he appears decisionally capacitated and refuses life-sustaining treatment. I challenge this ubiquitous practice. Emergency clinicians generally have a moral obligation to err on the side of stabilizing even suicide attempters who refuse such interventions. This obligation reflects the fact that it is typically infeasible to determine these patients…Read more
  •  74
    Kantian constructivism and the authority of others
    European Journal of Philosophy 28 (1): 77-92. 2020.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  63
    The Wrong of Eugenic Sterilization
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. forthcoming.
    I defend a novel account of the wrong of subjecting people to non-consensual sterilization (NCS), particularly in the context of the state-sponsored eugenics programmes once prevalent in the United States. What makes the eugenic practice of NCS distinctively wrong, I claim, is its dehumanizing core: the fact that it is tantamount to treating people as nonhuman animals, thereby expressing the degrading social meaning that they have the value of animals. The practice of NCS is prima facie seriousl…Read more
  •  23
    Objectification and Domination
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 406-440. 2021.
    I resolve a tension between two prominent strands of feminist social critique. On the first, the domination of women consists largely in their objectification, and the objectifying character of such domination primarily explains why it is wrong. On the second, some salient forms of domination have a distinctively intersubjective dimension that makes them crucially unlike our standard modes of relating to objects. Yet in that case, how could characterizing these acts as objectifying capture why t…Read more
  •  18
    Review of Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 647-650. 2021.
    On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It. BY LIVINGSTONE SMITHDAVID.