I am a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at UC Berkeley. I work in ethics. My advisors are Johann Frick and Jay Wallace. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy and math at UNC Chapel Hill.
We often do what another would want us to do, as when we continue a dead parent’s tradition, listen to a friend’s favorite musician, or channel a lover’s moral commitments. Such actions can be emotionally resonant and relationally significant. But if we have merely instrumental reasons to do what others would want given by the value of the underlying activity or of downstream outcomes, it’s unclear why these actions would have this significance. I introduce a paradigmatic form of doing what another would want I call “action from empathetic concern,” which requires, first, adopting an empathetic stance, and second, acting in light of the reasons that appear within that stance. By investigating our reasons for acting from empathetic concern, I explain why doing what another would want can be emotionally resonant: by valuing through another’s eyes and acting on those values, we respond to and strengthen our valuable relationships.
Some forms of aggregation, like intrapersonal aggregation, seem easier to justify than others. What conditions, in general, make aggregation easier to justify? Although many factors are plausibly relevant, this paper defends the Respectable Preference-Based Principle, on which aggregation is easier to justify when the affected parties respectably prefer it. Preferences are respectable, I argue, when they are informed, sufficiently reasonable, and sufficiently authentic. The view that emerges justifies aggregation by appealing not to impersonal value, but to personal value for the affected parties. This has some surprising upshots: intrapersonal aggregation is only sometimes fully justifiable; interpersonal aggregation can be even easier to justify than intrapersonal aggregation; and, in contrast with the popular idea that deontology covers people and utilitarianism covers animals, interanimal justification is in one important way harder to justify than interpersonal aggregation. The resulting view suggests a new way to draw moral lines, based not on the separateness of persons, but on the separateness of what I call “preference coalitions."
Many in animal ethics accept hierarchical views, on which people have a higher moral status than animals. They often charge that non-hierarchical views have implausible implications when paired with distributive principles like egalitarianism. Mice have worse lives than people, since they live shorter lives and can access a narrower range of goods. But if, as egalitarianism says, we should benefit those who are worse off, it seems to follow that we should benefit a typical mouse over a badly off person. I deflate this objection to non-hierarchical views. Hierarchical views are vulnerable to a structurally analogous problem, since they open the door to superior beings, whom we should benefit even if they’re better off than people. When paired with distributive principles, hierarchical views entail that we may need to prioritize helping superior beings develop and express their advanced capacities for art before helping people with cancer. Thus distributive principles do not pose a distinctive problem for non-hierarchical views. In fact, we face a dilemma: either animals have the same moral status as people, and we should benefit them on distributive grounds, or animals have a lower moral status, and we should benefit superior beings on distributive grounds.