•  4732
    Grit
    with Sarah K. Paul
    Ethics 129 (2): 175-203. 2018.
    Many of our most important goals require months or even years of effort to achieve, and some never get achieved at all. As social psychologists have lately emphasized, success in pursuing such goals requires the capacity for perseverance, or "grit." Philosophers have had little to say about grit, however, insofar as it differs from more familiar notions of willpower or continence. This leaves us ill-equipped to assess the social and moral implications of promoting grit. We propose that grit h…Read more
  •  913
    Resisting Pessimism Traps: The Limits of Believing in Oneself
    Wiley: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3): 728-746. 2021.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 728-746, May 2022.
  •  864
    Believing in Others
    Philosophical Topics 46 (1): 75-95. 2018.
    Suppose some person 'A' sets out to accomplish a difficult, long-term goal such as writing a passable Ph.D. thesis. What should you believe about whether A will succeed? The default answer is that you should believe whatever the total accessible evidence concerning A's abilities, circumstances, capacity for self-discipline, and so forth supports. But could it be that what you should believe depends in part on the relationship you have with A? We argue that it does, in the case where A is you…Read more
  •  187
    Reasoning under Scarcity
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 543-559. 2017.
    Practical deliberation consists in thinking about what to do. Such deliberation is deemed rational when it conforms to certain normative requirements. What is often ignored is the role that an agent's context can play in so-called ‘failures’ of rationality. In this paper, I use recent cognitive science research investigating the effects of resource-scarcity on decision-making and cognitive function to argue that context plays an important role in determining which norms should structure an agent…Read more
  •  132
    Toward an Ecological Theory of the Norms of Practical Deliberation
    European Journal of Philosophy 19 (4): 561-584. 2010.
    Abstract: Practical deliberation is deliberation concerning what to do governed by norms on intention (e.g. means-end coherence and consistency), which are taken to be a mark of rational deliberation. According to the theory of practical deliberation I develop in this paper we should think of the norms of rational practical deliberation ecologically: that is, the norms that constitute rational practical deliberation depend on the complex interaction between the psychological capacities of the ag…Read more
  •  110
    Cultural Code‐Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap
    Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (3): 259-281. 2013.
    The ability of agents to “culturally code-switch”, that is, switch between comprehensive, distinct, and potentially conflicting value systems has become a topic of interest to scholars examining the achievement gap because it appears to be a way for low-income minorities to remain authentically engaged with the values of their communities, while taking advantage of opportunities for further education and higher incomes available to those that participate in the middle-class. We have made some pr…Read more
  •  102
    The Miseducation of the Elite
    Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (1): 3-24. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  85
    Deliberating for Our Far Future Selves
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (4): 809-828. 2013.
    The temporal period between the moment of deliberation and the execution of the intention varies widely—from opening an umbrella when one feels the first raindrops hit to planning and writing a book. I investigate the distinctive ability that adult human beings have to deliberate for their far future selves exhibited at the latter end of this temporal spectrum, which I term prospective deliberation. What grounds it when it is successful? And, why does it fail in some cases? I shall argue that an…Read more
  •  80
    Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing You…Read more
  •  55
    Flourishing in the Academy: Complicity and Compromise
    Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 20 (3): 7-11. 2021.
  •  43
    Unlike other ways of coming to act, for example as a result of habit or impulse, practical reasoning imprints our actions with the distinctive mark of rational full-blooded agency. This entry enquires into what practical reasoning consists in. First, we lay out four basic criteria—mentality, evaluation, practicality, attributability—that adequate accounts of practical reasoning ought to satisfy in order to capture essential features of the phenomenon. Specifically, practical deliberation is a by…Read more
  •  42
  •  39
    The non-cognitive challenge to a liberal egalitarian education
    Theory and Research in Education 9 (3): 233-250. 2011.
    Political liberalism, conceived of as a response to the diversity of conceptions of the good in multicultural societies, aims to put forward a proposal for how to organize political institutions that is acceptable to a wide range of citizens. It does so by remaining neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good while giving all citizens a fair opportunity to access the offices and positions which enable them to pursue their own conception of the good. Public educational institutions are at …Read more
  •  37
    Inequality in Planning Capacity
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 41 (1): 56-65. 2024.
    Planning allows us to coordinate our actions over time, and the ability to plan is crucial in many areas of our lives. I argue that while planning is deeply embedded in contemporary societies, not all individuals have equal access to the structures that support such planning. This article explores how external planning-support structures are essential to our capacity to plan and how inequality in access to these structures can impact an individual's ability to deliberate and pursue long-term pla…Read more
  •  35
    The Costs of Consciousness Raising
    Philosophy of Education 77 (2): 232-238. 2021.
  •  32
    Philosophy as an Antidote to Injustice
    The Philosophers' Magazine 85 103-109. 2019.
  •  26
    In this essay, Jennifer Morton discusses educators as central examples of agents who engage in ideal and nonideal ways of thinking. The educator, as a representative of the political community, is tasked with two aims. The first is nurturing students with the skills and knowledge they need for the world as they will find it. In pursuing this goal, the educator is assuming certain social facts, some of them unjust, that constitute the present nonideal world. The second aim is civic — educating fu…Read more
  •  17
  •  17
    An antidote to injustice
    The Philosophers' Magazine 69 65-70. 2015.
  •  13
    Reconsidering idealisation
    The Philosophers' Magazine 72 83-84. 2016.
  •  8
    Educational Case Studies and Speaking for Others
    Educational Theory. forthcoming.
    We have good reasons to be concerned about the underrepresentation of historically marginalized people's perspectives from philosophical and academic discourse. Normative case studies provide a potential avenue through which we can address this lack of diversity. However, there is a risk that those who engage in this kind of project are “speaking for others” in ways that reproduce the inequalities we seek to remedy. While this challenge cannot be avoided, Jennifer Morton discusses here how the p…Read more