About My Research My most central research project right now is a critical rethinking of Kant’s theory of self-respect. Self-respect, whether we take Immanuel Kant’s work as our guide or not, is a fraught moral concept. On the one hand, it is widely recognized as an important moral value, one that takes on special power and importance in the context of struggle and oppression. When we think of self-respecting people, proud examples of protest, resistance, and courage in the face of injustice come to mind. On the other hand, there are serious worries about the concept of self-respect, too. Self-respect often shows up in moral discourse deeply bound up with a toxic sort of masculine individualism. Consider a paradigmatic example of self-respect: the patriarch of the starving family during the Great Depression, who proudly refuses the charity of his neighbors. Examples like this suggest that our “respect” for ourselves requires that we stubbornly refuse to admit that we have needs.
My view is that Kant’s understanding of self-respect is worth reclaiming because on a conceptual level, it ties self-respect directly to the fact that as human beings, our physical limitations and vulnerability before others and the world can make it difficult to treat ourselves as beings who are deeply morally important. However, Kant’s discussion of the behaviors and obligations that follow from the importance of self-respect fall almost completely in step with the worries outlined above. Supported by this (and other) evidence, powerful criticisms have been leveled against Kant’s moral theory as a whole, criticisms which are resonant with critiques of the notion of self-respect more generally: that it embraces the worst excesses of rational individualism, that it coldly rejects the emotional, dependent, and personal reality of our lives as human beings. When Kant says that we should respect ourselves, so the worry goes, he really means that we should respect only the “purely rational” aspect of ourselves and reject or disown our physical and animal selves. One can easily imagine Kant saying that the Great-Depression-Era man from our example is right to prioritize his independence over the gnawing of his and his family’s stomachs. One vein of my current research is especially historically focused. I am working on a reading of Kant guided by the understanding that his moral theorizing is affected in very significant ways by his understanding of humans as physical and animal beings. His discussion of self-respect and obligations to ourselves is indeed importantly limited, but not by a rejection of the significance of those physical and bodily aspects of human life he is often thought to consider irrelevant. His view assigns these aspects of our lives great importance, in fact, but he is operating with a litany of false assumptions about what is healthy and unhealthy for us as human animals and about what can and cannot successfully aid us in staying true to our moral vocation. When Kant glosses self-respect in terms of restraint in feeling and setting oneself up to operate self-sufficiently, his grounds for this are not a priori but a posteriori: based in the belief that these are the only strategies that really work, for beings like us. My historical project is to better understand Kant’s thinking about the human body and humans as animals, and to trace the ways this thinking influenced his theory of self-respect. The other vein of my research is more focused on normative ethics, and on reclaiming Kant’s historical notion of self-respect. In this part of the project, I aim to go back to the roots of Kant’s concept of self-respect and explore what it really means to value ourselves in the way he describes, in all our diversity and contingency. I believe that Kant’s concept of self-respect is valuable because it captures very directly self-respect as a moral value that matters in the context of what can be truly awful about being human. But I also believe his concept will be of no use to us if we do not do the work to uproot it from his restrictive understanding of what human experience is like and re-plant it into the human world as it really is, in all its complexity and richness. When we do this, I argue, we will find a Kantian theory that interweaves in surprising and affirming ways with important moral theoretical developments we have seen since, especially in Care Ethics and the Black Feminist tradition, and which forcefully affirms that caring for each other, asking for help, and many other things that a tradition heavily influenced by Kant has come to consider stereotypically opposed to our self-respect, are actually vital strategies for living up to it. A Sample of Short Papers I Have Presented:
On Kantian Self-Respect and Animality On Self-Conceit in Kant On Happiness and Comparativity in Kant |
(My partner, Patrick, sitting by Cayuga lake.)