Website: https://sites.google.com/view/samuelsteadman/home
My research is in ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy, with special emphasis on the nature of agency. I am currently developing the project undertaken in my dissertation, titled Normative Primitivism and the Possibility of Practical Thought, which synthesizes two strains of thought about reasons. One captures their formal dependence on agency, reflected in the fact that each reason is essentially a reason for some agent to do or think something. The other captures their substantive independence from agency, reflected in the fact that reasons need not answer to our particu…
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/samuelsteadman/home
My research is in ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy, with special emphasis on the nature of agency. I am currently developing the project undertaken in my dissertation, titled Normative Primitivism and the Possibility of Practical Thought, which synthesizes two strains of thought about reasons. One captures their formal dependence on agency, reflected in the fact that each reason is essentially a reason for some agent to do or think something. The other captures their substantive independence from agency, reflected in the fact that reasons need not answer to our particular agential nature. I offer a conception of the essential relation running from reasons to agents that obscures neither the transcendent character of reasons, nor the transcended character of agents.
My next goal is to flesh out a theory of agency, which I call a middle theory of agency, that begins from this mutually constitutive relationship between reasons and agents. I intend to accomplish this by way of three subprojects: first, by outlining the theory of agency in its own right, second, by applying it to problems in action theory, and third, by aligning it with contractualist moral philosophy.
