Philosophy
My main research is situated at the area of overlap between the metaphysics of agency, the theory of action and motivation, and theories of normativity. I especially like thinking about what it means to exercise (mainly practical) abilities, how the explanation of action works, what sort of capacities agents have, how these capacities and their exercise are involved in free and responsible action, and how the answers to these questions interact. In my PhD research, I tried to develop a novel actual-sequence approach to freedom and responsibility based on the notion of reasons-responsiveness. I still haven't given up on that project (on the contrary!). I am also interested in questions extending towards the metanormative parts of the project: What are normative reasons, and can we understand them as independent of our capacities to respond to them? I have a tendency to think that we can't, and thus have sympathies with constitutivist theories of normativity.
I also have interests in thinking about what sort of thing philosophy even is, and how we can make it more fun for everyone involved.
Recently, I have begun thinking about what conspiracy theories are.
Research Projects
Responsibility, Explanation, and the Exercise of Abilities
(DFG-funded Research Project)
The project develops a novel account of moral responsibility according to which the exercise (not merely the possession) of rational abilities grounds responsibility. The idea is that ascribing the exercise of an ability to an agent expresses a unique kind of explanatory judgment - a unifying explanation. We are responsible for those of our actions for which such an explanation can be offered.
We are often responsible for irrational actions, for which it is assumed no rational explanation can be given. In response to this difficulty, the project develops an account of the fallible (or 'privative') exercise of abilities and the corresponding explanations in terms of badly exercised abilities.
The other guiding idea of the project is that there are two irreconcilable perspectives on notions like freedom, responsibility, and control. We can either assess what the agent is free to do and responsible for ex ante, or we can assess what the agent did freely and responsibly ex post. I suspect this distinction is at the root of the debate between modal and so-called "actual-sequence" accounts of freedom and responsibility. For responsibility ex ante, only the possession of an ability is required. For responsibility ex post, we require an actual relationship between agent and action. This relationship is explanatory, on my account.
I recently received a 3-year DFG grant "Eigene Stelle" for this project.
Conspiracy Theories as Narratives
I argue that, contrary to what is usually assumed, conspiracy theories are not theories but narrative fictions, and "beliefs" in conspiracy theories are types of imagination and make-belief. This view has repercussions for the sense in which we should treat conspiracy theorists as responsible and what for counts as a viable strategy for resisting conspiracy theorising.
The project has now taken the shape of a book, which Transkript Verlag has offered to publish [in German!].
The Capacities of Agency
The more sophisticated capacities of agents - like the capacity to act freely or the capacity to act rationally - are usually thought of as composites of more simple capacities - like the capacity to act or even the capacity to produce bodily movement.
I have recently begun to suspect that this thought is incorrect, and that we should instead think of these capacities as functionally separate, independent systems.
This project is still young. Don't expect any major output anytime soon.
Papers and Texts
(2023) 'Failure and Success in Agency'. The Philosophical Quarterly.
A paper about the idea that the exercise of abilities always entails basic agentive success, i.e. the idea that an agent exercises the ability to x only if they successfully x. I argue that this is a bad idea, because it cannot accommodate basic performative mistakes in agency. Such mistakes a common: spilling things, dropping things, falling over...I argue that we must understand these mistakes as bad exercises of agentive abilities to perform actions successfully.
A paper that contrasts "alethic" models of conspiracy theories with narrative models. The extant debate almost exclusively assumes an alethic model: conspiracy theories are explanations or theories, people who engage with them have beliefs. According to a narrative model, conspiracy theories are not explanations, they are fictions (often fictions of explanations). Engagement with conspiracy theories therefore is like engagement with fictions, it is make-believe.
A paper that argues against the idea that responsiveness to reasons understood modally grounds freedom and responsibility. I point out that there are what I call "rational blind spots" in our ability to respond to reasons - highly specific and local blockages of our otherwise well functioning abilities. I try to show that modal accounts of reasons-responsiveness cannot appropriately capture these blind spots and that they will therefore return the wrong verdicts concerning freedom and responsibility in cases where the blind spots are activated.
(2022) ‘Why and When is Pure Moral Motivation Defective?’ Erkenntnis 87:1-20.
An exercise in moral psychology, where I try to figure out what, if anything, is off with agents who do the right thing because they want to do the right thing de dicto. My answer: these agents fail to respond to reasons (if rightness is not itself a reasons-giving property). But there is a way for de dicto motivation to circumvent this defect: agents can do the right thing for the right reasons because they want to do the right thing for the right reasons.
A paper where I try to analyse the strange dialectical phenomenon that many accounts motivated by the so-called Frankfurt Cases ultimately fall victim to those cases themselves. I suggest that this is because the literature has failed to notice that the problem posed by Frankfurt Cases is just one form of a more general problem about the nature of non-accidentality. Unless this deeper problem is solved, existing Frankfurt-friendly accounts will eventually run up against structurally equivalents of Frankfurt Cases.
A short comment I wrote about Romy Jaster's book Agents' Abilities
(2015) ‘Breaking good: Is there a patent recipe for cooking up the moral pill?’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 92, pp.137-145.
Something I wrote as an undgrad about finding a single unified element that could make any agent morally better. I was young.
Publications
Work in Progress
Two Perspectives on Freedom and Responsibility
I distinguish an ex ante from a ex post perspective on notions like freedom and responsibility. From the ex ante perspective, actions are free if at the time of action the agent is free to perform them - even if they have not yet acted. This perspective is therefore "capacitarian": the possession of a capacity or ability is enough for a freedom-fact to obtain. From the ex post perspective, actions are free if they are related to the agent in a specific (many think causal, I think explanatory) way. This perspective therefore requires the action to be fully present as a completed performance. Correspondingly, the perspective requires more than just the possession of a capacity - it requires its exercise. I show how these two perspectives are not easily reconcilable, and how they can be used to explain some oddities in debates surrounding freedom and responsibility.
Currently trying to get together an overview draft
What Do We Explain When We Explain Actions?
There are two opposing tendencies concerning the explanation of action. On the one hand, we often want to explain particular doings of ours, and our normative practices corroborate this. On the other hand, there seem to be general considerations to do with the logical structure of action sentences and the nature of explanation that support the conclusion that we can only ever explain generalised facts. I gather evidence for both sides and end up with a dilemma.
A rough written version exists, but I'm feeling vulnerable about it.
Towards a Hypological-First account of Normativity
What is the relationship between acting for reasons and reasons for acting? This is an important question not only for philosophers of actions but also for philosophers of normativity. When someone acts for a sufficient normative reason - when they do what is right for the right reasons - this after all constitutes an important normative fact, and an important, under-theorised species of fact - a hypological fact. It is often assumed that a theory of normativity can get hypological facts, as it were, for free, because it can understand them as composites of whatever it treats as atomic normative facts (reasons, say) and facts about agency. Acting for reasons then is just acting plus reasons. But this composite view has come under fire from disjunctivist arguments recently. If acting for reasons was just acting plus reasons, these arguments contend, then there shouldn't be cases where someone accidentally does what their reasons recommend yet does not act for reasons. But there are such cases. In fact, it is crucial for our understanding of hypological facts that they are not just composites of two independent facts. So, no theory of normativity gets hypological facts for free. In fact, there is good reason to suppose that we should perhaps turn the direction of explanation around and suppose that hypological facts are normatively atomic.
No written version exists, but I'm happy to talk about it.
On the Very Idea of a Motivating Reason
The idea that there are so-called motivating reasons is central to a number of projects in the theory of action and the theory of normativity. Motivating reasons are supposed to be facts or propositions that rationalise what the agent does from their perspective. But this minimal definition lumps two types of action together that should be kept apart: Some actions are the exercises of rational agency, some actions are not. The notion of a motivating reason currently in use cuts across this important distinction. It should be given up, I think.
I will awkwardly mumble about this if I know you well.
Answerability and the Morally Incomprehensible
Sometimes, when someone did something morally horrible to us, part of our inability to forgive stems from the fact that we cannot fully understand (and they cannot fully explain) why it was done. This is because our explanatory demands in cases of wrongdoing are exceptionally high. We don't just want to know why someone did something but why they specifically did something under a highly specific description - how could you do this? we ask. When no explanation can measure up to these demands, what the person has done becomes morally incomprehensible.
Don't ask unless I'm in a good mood.
Rants, Texts
What is Good Philosophy? - A philosophical Pamphlet
A rant about how philosophers are sceptics about every imaginable truism out there, but are absolutely certain philosophical quality is real, objective and they can tell who has it.
Might go up on the blog eventually.
Spiegelmaschinen (Engl. Mirror Machines)
A rant about why everyone is so impressed with chat GPT and A.I. generated art. I compare this with being impressed by horoscopes or Myers-Briggs scores.