How do modern social and political institutions shape human agency? And how can we use our agency to change these institutions for the better? My research addresses these questions at the intersection of moral psychology and social/political philosophy. I begin from concrete problems that face variously situated agents, and articulate the wider theoretical contexts of those problems. My research draws from a variety of philosophical traditions, primary amongst them the global pragmatist tradition as exemplified in John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar, but also the Black radical tradition, feminist traditions, Buddhist modernism, and anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial practices from around the globe. My work is cross-disciplinary, engaging with the law and the social sciences. I am developing competences in Asian philosophical traditions and Asian American critical philosophy, both in connection with my main research program and independently of it.
Book Project
My current book project is entitled The Problem of Unfreedom. Unfreedom constrains people’s agency. It thus makes it more difficult for people to change the features of their social situation that are the causes of their unfreedom. Unfreedom is self-stabilizing. It locks itself in place. This is the problem of unfreedom: people are unfree because of the social and political structures under which they live. Becoming freer requires changing those structures. But changing the structures requires exercising freedom. So it may seem that people must already be free in order to become free. And if that is so, can those who are unfree free themselves?
Here is a short public philosophy piece on “Unfreedom“, published in The Philosopher as part of the “Society” issue of their four-part series on “The New Basics” in philosophy. Inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords, “The New Basics” considers 48 philosophical concepts for our time grouped in four themes: 1) Planet; 2) Society; 3) Person; 4) Philosophy.
Published Papers
“Oppression, Domination, and the Structure of Graded Inequality,” (forthcoming) Philosophers’ Imprint: https://doi.org/10.3998/phimp.3192. Pre-print available here.
What structure do paradigm cases of oppression and domination, like racism and capitalism, have? Most theories of oppression and domination take them to have a binary structure. There are the oppressors and the oppressed, the dominators and the dominated. I argue that a better model for many paradigm cases of oppression and domination is a structure of graded inequality. Such a structure comprises multiple groups arranged in hierarchically ascending and descending order. A model of graded inequality has both descriptive and explanatory advantages over a binary model. It better illuminates some mechanisms by which oppression and domination stabilize themselves. Understanding those mechanisms allows us better to destabilize them. That is so even though good reasons may hold for adopting the binary (or some other) model for other purposes. The larger methodological upshot of the paper is to connect more closely social philosophy to moral psychology.
“Law as a Social Practice and the Concept of Agency,” in Maciej Dybowski, Weronika Dzięgielewska, Wojciech Rzepiński (eds), Practices in Legal and Social Theories (Routledge, forthcoming). Email for pre-print.
Law, as a normative practice, bears at least two aspects. The first is that it is normative; the second that it is a social practice. The normative aspect of law is reflected in the standard contemporary conception of law in analytic legal philosophy: that law is a system of norms. On that conception of law, legal norms guide the behaviour of rational agents through giving them reasons for action. Law understood as a system of norms presupposes agency, conceived of in terms of a capacity for rational deliberation. Law’s second aspect is that it is a social practice. What conception of agency is implied by a social practice conception of law? I argue that a social practice conception of law implies a wider conception of agency than the rational deliberation conception presupposed by the conception of law as a system of norms. According to that wider conception, found in pragmatist and phenomenological philosophical traditions, among others, agency consists in a variety of meaning-laden modes of engaging with the world and each other: habits, capacities for feeling and emotion and perception. Seen in its second aspect, law does not only presuppose these capacities, but shapes the form they take. That law has these two aspects raises a question about the relation between them. Instead of arguing for the metaphysical priority of one or the other, I suggest that neither of these ways of seeing law is inherently better or worse than the other. I adopt a methodological pragmatism: the way we look at law should be driven by the purposes that we have. One reason for seeing law as a social practice is that it emphasizes a theoretical perspective that decenters the state and pays attention to why law matters (or might matter) to ordinary people. Focusing on the social practice aspect of law also raises a number of questions about the status of law as a social practice and its relation to other practices. I claim that the specific relation between law and other social practices is contingent. It may even be possible, I suggest, that law is thoroughly disconnected from other social practices – even though the social practice account tends to emphasize the ways in which law interacts with other social practices.
“The Limits of Constituent Power? Vice and Illiberalism,” (2023) Journal of Legal Philosophy 48(1): 54-60.
A comment on Joel Colón-Ríos’s Constituent Power and the Law (OUP, 2020), bringing together Colón-Ríos’s account of education and constituent power with Rousseau’s account of subject formation and Marxist political economy.
“In Defense of Political Equality: On Bai Tongdong’s Against Political Equality,” (2022) Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 37: 59-90. Open access, available at DOI:10.22916/jcpc.2022..37.59.
Bai Tongdong’s Against Political Equality argues for Confucian meritocracy over a pure democracy of equals. His arguments draw on a multiple modernities comparison between the Spring and Autumn Warring States period in China and early modernity in the West, and rest on a Mencian conception of human nature according to which humans are equal in moral potential but not in moral actuality. I argue that there is a crucial disanalogy between this Chinese early modernity and Western early modernity: the role of capitalism. In a similarly comparativist and modernist spirit, drawing on B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi, I argue that this disanalogy challenges both Bai’s critique of democracy and his positive account. Bai’s failure to take into account the role of capitalism in Western modernity raises a challenge to the explanatory power of his Mencian conception of human nature with regard to the failings of contemporary democracies, namely that capitalism fosters the relevant features of our moral psychology that cause those failings. Further, without that grounding assumption, Bai’s arguments against democracy cut equally against his Confucian meritocracy. The disanalogy also creates challenges for his positive proposal. Bai, I argue, provides an ideal theory of Confucian meritocracy at the same time as he provides a non-ideal theory of democracy. But, taking into account the non-ideal cultural and moral psychological features of capitalism, Bai’s Confucian meritocracy is likely to fall into an unjust and oligarchic hierarchy.
“Cosmopolitanism, Creolization, and Non-Exceptionalist Buddhist Modernisms,” (2022) Comparative Philosophy 13(1): 139-59.
In his recent book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson argues that inter-tradition or cross-cultural philosophical dialogue ought to be governed by cosmopolitan conversational norms that do not subsume any one tradition’s deep commitments under those of any other tradition, but rather bring those commitments into the discussion so that they can be challenged and defended. He argues on this basis for the application of a deeply contextualist and historicist interpretive methodology to Buddhist texts, concepts, and theories in dialogue with philosophy and contemporary cognitive sciences. Buddhist modernism, in eschewing that deeply contextualist and historicist methodology, falls short of those cosmopolitan commitments. We argue that Thompson’s cosmopolitan commitments do not mandate the deeply contextualist and historicist methodology he recommends. As an alternative, we propose a creolizing methodology that finds value in mixing, reinterpreting, and reinventing cultural traditions and other forms of belonging to address the complex problems the world faces. We suggest that such a creolizing methodology can be found in other forms of Buddhist modernism than those Thompson criticizes. We provide, as two examples, the thought of the Chinese monk Taixu and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
“Dewey and the Tragedy of the Human Condition,” (2021) The Pluralist 16(1): 26-40, published as the recipient of the Joseph L. Blau Prize, awarded annually by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for the paper that makes the most significant contribution to the history of American Philosophy.
Critics of Dewey have argued that he fails to recognise the tragic dimension that is central to human existence, and so accuse Dewey of various philosophical sins, including scientism and unjustified optimism about human progress. I argue that, to the contrary, fundamental to Dewey’s thought is an understanding of what I call the tragedy of the human condition. For Dewey this tragedy is a feature of our fundamental agential relation to the world. This relation conditions human agency by necessitating, enabling, and constraining agency. In responding to tragedy in this transactional sense, humans often succumb to a secondary sense of tragedy that we can call hubris: a desire to transcend the limitations of our condition. These two senses of tragedy underpin and unify key themes in Dewey’s thought: his subsumption of theoretical to practical agency, his connection between agency and value, and his critique of certain forms of scientism.
“Re-reading the Declaration of Independence as perlocutionary performative,” (2016) Res Publica 22(4): 423-444.
This paper addresses the question of the constitution of ‘the people’. It argues that J.L. Austin’s concept of the ‘perlocutionary’ speech act gives us a framework for understanding the constitutive force of a specific constitutional document: the American Declaration of Independence. It does so through responding to Derrida’s analysis of the Declaration, which itself draws on Austin’s work. Derrida argues that the Declaration’s constitutive force lies in the fact that it cannot be simply understood as either ‘performative’ or ‘constative’, in Austin’s terminology. According to Derrida, ‘the people’ do not pre-exist the Declaration, but are constituted in the act of declaration itself. In response, I argue that while Derrida’s insight regarding the constitution of ‘the people’ is sound, his analysis misses two key aspects of the Declaration. These two lacunae point the way to an understanding of the constitutive force of the Declaration in terms of Austin’s ‘perlocutionary’ speech act.
“The constitutive rhetoric of the Preamble to the Australian Constitution as a ‘performative utterance’,” (2014) Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 39:42-65.
The Preamble to the Australian Constitution enacts the prior agreement of ‘the people’ to ‘unite into one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth’. Did ‘the people’ exist prior to this enactment, or were they formed at the moment of the enactment? In J.L. Austin’s terms, is the Preamble a ‘constative’ utterance, describing the prior agreement of the people, or is it a ‘performative’ utterance, which itself constitutes the people? I argue, following Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the American Declaration of Independence, that it is neither. Rather, the constitution of ‘the people’ in the Preamble into the ‘Federal Commonwealth’ occurs rhetorically through what Austin called the ‘perlocutionary’ speech act, which is neither strictly ‘performative’ nor ‘constative’.
“The educative potential of industrial action: lessons from the picket line,” (2014) Australian Universities Review 56(1): 61-66.
I argue, drawing on experiences on university picket lines in Australia in the early 2010s, that a flexible and moving picket line that is not limited to the outside physical boundary of the university can combine the demands of industrial action with a deep-learning based educative philosophy. (Note: Australian industrial relations law is very different from U.S. industrial relations law.)
Papers in the pipeline
I have series of papers, at different stages, on the moral psychology of politics:
Paper on blaming the system (under review)
Paper in the philosophy of action and oppressive social practices (under review)
Paper on liberalism and distrust (under review)
Paper on the structure of oppression and domination (under review)
John Dewey’s Critique of Political Democracy under Capitalism (in full draft): Our present forms of democracy are failing us as forms of governance. Some think that is because human nature is unsuited to democracy. We are too self-interested, short-sighted, irrational, apathetic. Such critiques were levelled a century ago by Walter Lippmann in the 1920s. In this paper, I reconstruct John Dewey’s competing diagnosis of the failures of democracy in response to Lippmann. Dewey argues that democracy is failing because of ways of thinking and feeling – a moral psychology – fostered by capitalism. Democracy under capitalism falls into plutocracy. And in doing so, we lose our main institutional method of changing this situation. Instead of democracy and capitalism being good bedfellows, as was commonly thought in the first two decades and last two decades of the 20th century, capitalism undermines the potential for a true democracy. And, in turn, our plutocratic form of democracy enables and underpins the rampant exploitations, oppressions, and inequalities of capitalism.
Du Bois and the Self-Interestedness of Racial Capitalism (in full draft): Self-interestedness is commonly appealed to in order to explain the stability of racist social institutions. What is self-interestedness, and why are people self-interested? Du Bois provides a distinctive answer. Self-interestedness is not merely a subjective motivation to act so as to achieve one’s own interests. It is an “orientation” – a deep part of an agent’s moral psychology that patterns and shapes the ways they engage with the world. Self-interestedness is not natural to humans. It is fostered by capitalism. It plays an essential role in the systemic interconnection of racism and capitalism – that racism facilitates and is stabilised by capitalism. Conceiving of self-interestedness as an orientation has upshots for how agents can address institutional racism.
The Stability of Bad Things (in progress): Western political philosophy has long been concerned with the stability of a social order. In that tradition, stability has been taken to be a good thing, whether because the object of investigation has been the stability of a just (or reasonably just) order, or because stability has been taken as a good in itself, insofar as it enables the achievement of other social goods, or the development of deeper forms of cooperation. But should we take stability always to be a good? What about the stability – the persistence over time – of racial, patriarchal, and capitalist oppression, domination, and other forms of injustice and unfreedom? These social phenomena are stable in the face of constant efforts by activists and resisters to change them. Call this the question of the stability of bad things. Understanding the stability of bad things serves a practical purpose: the undermining of those bad things and the institution of better things. Bad things, I argue, are self-stabilizing, even as people try to undermine them. They self-stabilize through shaping the moral psychologies of the agents who live under them.
Hermeneutical Self-Knowledge and Social Criticism (in progress): I outline a distinctive kind of first-personal self-knowledge: hermeneutical self-knowledge. Hermeneutical self-knowledge aims to do justice to the fact that we are rational agents who are shaped in ways unknown to us by our historical and social context. It is a view of the kind of self-knowledge that we can have of ourselves as shaped by that context. The standard view in the literature, against which my conception of hermeneutical self-knowledge is set, is that the kind of self-knowledge that we can come to have of our social formation is third-personal. It is unlike the first-personal and practical kind of self-knowledge that we have as rational agents of our actions and intentional states. These third-personal forms of self-knowledge are bound up with objectifying modernist modes of thinking that lie at the heart of modern systems of oppression – capitalism, colonialism, racism – and the systemic injustices that attend them. Those systems of oppression are maintained, in part, through how agents are socially formed. If we can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, then addressing these systemic injustices may require new tools, including hermeneutical self-knowledge.
“Because We Are the Only Hope We Have”: Interpersonal Hope in Times of Hopelessness (in progress): In 1979, the Welsh critic Raymond Williams described that time as one of “the loss of hope; the slowly settling loss of any acceptable future.” The times have only worsened, in ways that afflict all standard accounts of hope insofar as they take as their object future states of affairs. I argue, drawing on a conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, for a kind of hope in others that plays a distinctive role in resisting injustice.
Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies
I am the Associate Editor, with A. Minh Nguyen, of the APA Studies on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies (formerly the APA Newsletter on the same). The publication is biannual.
Vol. 23, No. 1 (Fall 2023): Identity and Solidarity. This issue contains five essays on racial identity and inter-racial solidarity, as well as an interview that the editors and Arnab Roy (FGCU) conducted with Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring 2023): Korean Philosophy. This issue contains four new essays on aspects of Korean philosophy, from Korean state Confucianism to Korean Buddhism and North Korean Juche, as well as commentary by P.J. Ivanhoe and responses to Ivanhoe by two authors.
Vol. 22, No. 1 (Fall 2022): The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi (also co-edited with Douglas Allen). This issue contains thirteen new essays on Gandhi’s philosophy, on ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truth), swaraj (self-rule), satyagraha (firmness on truth), sarvodaya (well-being and uplift of all), and other Gandhian concepts.
Vol. 21, Nos. 1-2 (Fall 2021-Spring 2022): Special Double Issue on Japanese Aesthetics. This issue collects twenty previously unpublished papers on various issues in Japanese aesthetics.
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 2021): Author-meets-Critics Issue on Evan Thompson’s Why I Am Not a Buddhist. Nine critics read Evan Thompson’s wonderful autobiographical criticism of Buddhist modernism, and Thompson responds.
Vol. 20, No. 1 (Fall 2020): What is it Like to be a Philosopher of Asian Descent?. Twenty nine philosophers of Asian descent reflect on their life, their work, and the profession. The issue includes a memorial notice to the trailblazing Professor Jaegwon Kim (1934-2019) from his colleagues at Brown.
I have organised panels at APA divisional meetings on Asian American identity and Asian and Asian American political philosophy.