Current Research (In-progress)
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“Let’s Talk About Sex: The (limited) role of consent in sexual discourse”
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that a feature of sexual consent discourse which contributes to the complicated nature of current philosophical debate about consent’s utility is that consent is often ambiguously treated as a central feature of not only non-criminal sex, but also of good sex. Acceptable sex, which is the focus in much of the consent literature, seems to blend these notions of non-criminality and goodness together in ways which make the discourse morally messy. On my account, sex has multiple meaningful ethical dimensions along which it can be judged; sex can be consensual or nonconsensual, it can be responsible or irresponsible, it can be pleasurable or unpleasurable. These dimensions come apart, and sexual consent, though often treated as relevant to all features of sexual experience, is not (or, at least, not directly) relevant to whether sex is ‘good’ or not. In fact, I argue (maybe surprisingly) that consent is only directly relevant to the legal permissibility of a sexual encounter, and not to whether the sex is responsible or pleasurable. Addressing this misapplication of sexual consent, then, involves identifying and communicating the scope of sexual consent. And delineating this scope requires better articulation of the three core ethical dimensions (consent, responsibility, pleasure) that I take to comprise sex. I highlight what these dimensions involve, how they work together and come apart, and why I take them to resolve some of the philosophical disagreement over the role of consent in sexual ethics. I close this paper by considering how rape culture has contributed to the (I argue, mistakenly) overarching position that consent holds in the philosophical literature on sex.
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“Incarceration and Surplus Vulnerability” (draft)
ABSTRACT: Incarceration – the long-term confinement of an individual, usually in a correctional facility – is increasingly a topic of controversy among those concerned with public safety and the promotion of social good. The discourse surrounding the ethics of incarceration takes up questions like, “What treatment of wrongdoers is most likely to improve overall levels of public safety?” and “What kind of treatment of wrongdoers is morally acceptable in redressing harms to others?”. More and more, empirically-informed (Q1) and normative (Q2) responses to these questions suggest that the multiplicity of harms done to those incarcerated qua incarcerated is ethically impermissible. These critiques of incarceration as a socio-judicial practice often raise concerns about the vulnerability of the incarcerated, both outside and inside the confines of detention centres. In this paper, I marry these two discussions of i) the ethics of incarceration and ii) the relationship between vulnerability and autonomy. I use Joel Anderson’s work on “surplus vulnerability” to articulate one meaningful source of the wrongness of incarceration: that it reliably negatively impacts offenders’ autonomy in domains which are not the legitimate focuses of detention. Even if, within a carceral framework, incarceration can permissibly impede autonomy of offenders in certain ways, current carceral practices regularly go far beyond this permissible threshold, making offenders excessively vulnerable.
Published Research
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“Non-Ideal Theory and Critical Prison Studies” Co-authored with Dr. Andrea Pitts, Forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory (Ed. Hilkje C. Hänel & Johanna Müller).
ABSTRACT: This chapter explores approaches to critical prison studies through non-ideal methodologies, with an emphasis on the liberatory political potential for such research. It uses three approaches from a non-ideal perspective. The first section highlights the kinds of methodological practices that facilitate responsible critical prison scholarship, and we argue that such approaches largely begin from the experiential, existential, and phenomenological aspects of incarceration itself. Specifically, we discuss the methodological importance of prioritizing the first-person experiences of incarcerated peoples and their communities within critical prison scholarship. The second section surveys potential pedagogical practices that traverse barriers to the exploration and understanding of carceral experiences, including inside/outside curricula, letter-writing projects, art programming, and more general educational reforms that are proposed as potential sites for doing critical prison studies through a non-ideal lens as well. The third section then turns to what we describe as insurrectionist and abolitionist approaches to critical prison scholarship. We likewise explore the ways in which, as liberatory in their scope and content, insurrectionist and abolitionist approaches to critical prison studies operate on a different set of socio-political aims than the two previous methodologies explored.
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“Speaking of ‘Violence’: Figleaf use in sexualized violence contexts” The Philosophical Quarterly, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqae047
ABSTRACT: In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf, a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul’s work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track those of Saul’s figleaves. In other words, I am developing a figleaf variant, showing that this conceptual tool is useful for analyzing utterances beyond racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech, upon which Saul focuses. Rather, bringing figleaves into the realm of sexualized violence discourse illuminates features of the discourse which are often obscured by the prevalence of strong social intuitions about rapists and their corresponding character.