Research

Works in Progress

Books

Perfectionism and Love

My current book project, Perfectionism and Love, examines how existing perfectionist theories of well-being explain the value of love and interpersonal relationships more broadly. Virtually all perfectionist theories explain the value of interpersonal relationships in terms of the exercise of the rational capacities. I argue the conception of the rational capacities found in existing perfectionist theories leads to inadequate explanations of the value of love and interpersonal relationships because all valuable activity must be explained in terms of the capacities of a single individual. I develop an alternative account of perfectionism that explains the value of human activity in terms of the activity of the communicative capacities. Since the capacity for communicative activity I develop is inherently interpersonal, it also explains the value of interpersonal activity and love within a perfectionist theory of well-being.

Papers

Dispensable or Replaceable: A Dilemma for Theories of Love

According to what we might call the “puzzle of love,” loving regard must be responsive to the beloved, and that responsiveness must be compatible with the beloved’s irreplaceability to the lover. I argue that no existing theory solves the puzzle, and that the failures share a single root cause. Value-based theories, care-based theories, evaluative theories, union theories, and relational theories all treat love as a state of the lover. But a state of the lover can put the lover in contact with the beloved in only two ways: first-personally, through the lover’s own states, or third-personally, through properties the beloved instantiates. Access limited to the beloved’s properties renders her replaceable; access limited to the lover’s states renders her dispensable. Since these exhaust the ways a state of the lover could ground access to the beloved, the puzzle cannot be solved by any theory of that form.

Draft available on request.

A Problem for Constructivist Accounts of Interpersonal Normativity

Three core moral theories construct interpersonal normativity (the standing of persons to claim, answer, and matter to one another) from materials that are not already interpersonal: sentimentalism constructs it from the felt states of individuals; Kantian constructivism, including Darwall’s second-personal extension, derives it from the rational nature of individuals; and recognition theory, in Nussbaum’s and Honneth’s developmental versions, grows it from the pre-social condition of the infant. I argue that each program fails because they presuppose the interpersonal normativity they claim to construct from non-interpersonal materials. Hume’s common point of view presupposes the normative contrast it was built to deliver; Darwall’s second-personal concepts form an interdefinable circle that presupposes the shared standing they are meant to explain; the developmental accounts derive cooperative recognition from an adversarial starting point that already presupposes it. I use these failures to argue for a common root cause: any theory whose basic materials are states of individual subjects, whether those states are felt, willed, or judged, cannot explain interpersonal normativity without circularity.