•  13
    Authors, narrators, and autonomous agents: The art of relational autobiography
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 61 (S1): 50-61. 2023.
    In this article, I consider several different ways of unpacking the metaphor of self-authorship, asking what an author might be and how authorship thus understood might be related to personal autonomy. First, I consider authors as makers or creators in a generic sense. Next, I consider authors as a particular sort of creator (the creator of a text), and, finally, authors as an interpretive construct implied by a text. Ultimately, I argue that we both construct ourselves as authors and take respo…Read more
  • Trust, Mistrust, and Autonomy
    In David Collins, Iris Vidmar Jovanovic & Mark Alfano (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Trust, Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 105-121. 2023.
    Is autonomy – governing yourself – compatible with letting yourself be governed by trust? This paper argues that autonomy is not only compatible with appropriate trust but actually requires it. Autonomy requires appropriate trust because it is undermined by inappropriate mistrust. An autonomous agent treats herself as answerable for her action-guiding commitments, where answerability requires openness to the rational influence of external, critical perspectives on those commitments. This opennes…Read more
  •  130
    ‘Who's to Say?’: Responsibility, Entitlement, and Educating for Autonomy
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (4): 597-615. 2021.
    Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  20
    Education for autonomy, and for care: a comment on Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to Care
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 25 (6): 820-826. 2022.
    In this paper I examine and elaborate on Asha Bhandary’s conception of autonomy, and take up the question of what education for autonomy, thus understood, might require. I argue that educating for autonomy requires educators to impart, to students, an interlocking set of dialogical or relational skills that center responsiveness to the perspectives of others, and that these skills significantly overlap with the skills required for basic education in care.
  •  16
    Stories of Forgiveness
    Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (3): 312-317. 2019.
    ABSTRACT Miranda Fricker argues that paradigm-based explanations take a more direct and transparent route to the same destination as State of Nature storytelling, offering hypotheses about the basic purpose of a practice while dispensing with distracting narrative elements. I argue that narratives of forgiveness are not simply dispensable; they but offer a form of emotional and evaluative understanding to which there is no more direct route.
  • Review of Inside Ethics by Alice Crary (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016. 2016.
  •  2
    Narrative Necessity and the Fixity of Meaning in a Life
    Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics 2 (21): 391-398. 2011.
  •  1
    This essay identifies a connection between the capacities required for individual autonomy and the capacities required for a particular form of shared agency. Like other feminist philosophers, I hold that individual autonomy must be understood in relational terms. In the first section of the essay, I argue that that autonomy is constitutively relational in the sense that it depends upon a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives. In the second section,…Read more
  •  3
    Autonomy and Self-Care
    In Mark Piper & Andrea Veltman (eds.), Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender, . 2014.
    Recent feminist accounts of autonomy have focused both on autonomous agents’ relationships to others and on their self-regarding attitudes or self-relations. This chapter focuses on the attitude of practical self-care, arguing that autonomous agents must care about themselves in a sense that amounts to caring about their practical reasons. While self-care is primarily a self-relation, it also implies a form of interpersonal relationality. Caring about one’s reasons requires caring about intersub…Read more
  •  4
    Untold Sorrow
    In Anna Gotlib (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Sadness, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2017.
    The phrase “untold sorrow” evokes a sorrow that is both unnarrated (perhaps unnarratable) and of an incalculably large or unfathomable magnitude. It gestures toward experiences of loss that lie beyond the limits of ordinary comprehension. Yet there is a sense in which all loss confounds ordinary ways of relating to objects of care. In this paper I explore connections between loss, meaningfulness, and the narratability (or unnarratability) of sorrow. The point of narrating of loss is not necessar…Read more
  •  2
    Autonomy, at least in one sense of the term, requires sovereign authority over one’s choices and actions. In this paper, I argue that such authority is relational in at least two respects. First, I argue that sovereign authority may be shared – and, indeed, must be shareable – with others through the exercise of normative powers. Second, I argue that normative powers are themselves relational powers, powers that depend in part on the recognition of agents as having an equal basic authority to …Read more
  •  4
    Answerability Without Blame?
    In Marina Oshana, Katrina Hutchison & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility, Oup Usa. 2018.
    Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems ri…Read more
  •  51
    Who Do We Think We Are?
    Philosophy and Literature 43 (1): 173-191. 2019.
    Our moral lives are replete with acts of autobiographical story-telling. The stories we tell are intended to help others understand what we do by helping them understand “who we are” in a practical or normative sense. The act of addressing one’s stories to an audience, however, is as likely to destabilize as it is to confirm one’s understanding of “who one is”. Drawing on themes in Wally Lamb’s novel I Know This Much is True, I offer a dialogical account of narrative self-transformation, and …Read more
  •  150
    Deciding Together
    Philosophers' Imprint 9. 2009.
    In this paper I develop a conception of joint practical deliberation as a special type of shared cooperative activity, through which co-deliberators jointly accept reasons as applying to them as a pair or group. I argue, moreover, that the aspiration to deliberative “pairhood” is distinguished by a special concern for mutuality that guides each deliberator’s readiness to accept a given consideration as a reason-for-us. It matters to each of us, as joint deliberators, that each party’s (individua…Read more
  •  126
    The Reunion of Marriage
    The Monist 91 (3-4): 558-577. 2008.
  • In this dissertation I argue that responsibility for self is an important feature of human agency, crucial to the autonomy of individual agents as well as to joint deliberation and the sharing of ends in relations of love and friendship. I argue that the sort of 'selflessness' involved in extreme self-abnegating deference undermines responsibility for self, and that it compromises the capacity to enter into fully reciprocal interpersonal relationships. Responsibility for self, on my view, consis…Read more
  •  175
    Autonomy, Authority, and Answerability
    Jurisprudence 2 (1): 161-179. 2011.
    Autonomy seems to require that we engage in practical deliberation and come to our own decisions regarding how we will act. Deference to authority, by contrast, seems to require that we suspend deliberation and do what the authority commands precisely because he or she commands it. How, then, could autonomy be compatible with deference to authority? In his critique of Razian instrumentalism, Stephen Darwall lays the groundwork for a distinctively contractualist answer to this question: the norma…Read more
  •  55
    Victims' Stories: A Call to Care
    Metaphilosophy 49 (1-2): 27-39. 2018.
    In her book Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, Diana Meyers offers a careful analysis of victims' stories as a narrative genre, and she argues that stories in this genre function as a call to care: they both depict a moral void and issue a moral demand, thereby fostering the development of a culture of human rights. This article, while finding Meyers's articulation of this idea compelling, questions Meyers's account of how victims' stories do their moral work. Whereas Meyers a…Read more
  •  144
    Deference as a normative power
    Philosophical Studies 166 (3): 455-474. 2013.
    Much of the literature on practical authority concerns the authority of the state over its subjects—authority to which we are, as G. E. M. Anscombe says, subject “willy nilly”. Yet many of our “willy” (or voluntary) relationships also seem to involve the exercise of practical authority, and this species of authority is in some ways even more puzzling than authority willy nilly. In this paper I argue that voluntary authority relies on a form of voluntary obligation that is akin (in some respects)…Read more
  •  385
    She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there was a draught, she sat in it—in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others. — Virginia Woolf (1979, 59).
  •  226
    Anger, Faith, and Forgiveness
    The Monist 92 (4): 507-536. 2009.
    Right after our tragedy, my idea of forgiveness was to be free of this thing, – the anger, the pain, the absorption. It was totally personal. It was a survival tactic to leave this experience behind. It had nothing to do with the offender. The second level was realizing how the word forgiveness applies to the relationship between the victim and the offender. How it means accepting and working on that relationship after a murder. The latter is more complicated. Now I think I see that forgiveness …Read more
  •  454
    Rethinking Relational Autonomy
    Hypatia 24 (4): 26-49. 2009.
    John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does ans…Read more