Current Research

My current research is investigating the proper ordering of socio-institutional values and drawing on King to resolve the debate between Rawls, Sandel, and Baier. Rawls claimed that the preeminent socio-institutional value was “justice” – an assertion that communitarians and feminists have taken him to task for. Here I present and evaluate four accounts of where justice ranks as a socio-institutional value. First, I discuss what I call the Predominance Account, which takes justice to be predominant as a socio-institutional value. Second, I discuss the view of Michael Sandel, which I call the Subordinate Account. According to the Subordinate Account, justice is subordinate to at least one other socio-institutional value: community. Similarly to the Subordinate Account, I consider Annette’s Baier’s Supplemental Account, which takes justice to be valuable but not of greater value than caring for others. Against these three accounts of the value-rank of justice, I argue that Martin Luther King, Jr. held justice to be interdependent with two other socio-institutional values: what he called “brotherhood” and “goodwill.” I suggest that King’s view of justice as a socio-institutional value is akin to a classical unity of the virtues account, meaning that justice cannot exist independent of brotherhood and goodwill and these socio-institutional values cannot exist independent of justice (or each other). 

Forthcoming Research

Love Thy “Enemy-Neighbor”: Affective Polarization and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Notion of Agape 

Affective polarization refers to the extent to which partisans treat each other as a disliked outgroup and is a growing problem in the United States. Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of the tragic in Poetics, I argue that affective polarization in the United States is tragic. Specifically, I draw on Aristotle’s notion that a tragedy entails the undoing of a person through some error of judgment and argue that affective polarization is the result of judgment errors. I then propose Martin Luther King’s account of agape as a virtuous response to the tragedy of affective polarization. 

Dissertation

In my dissertation I argue that humility is a virtue of elected public officials and look specifically to members of the United States Congress in applying this research. In Chapter II, I survey and critique contemporary scholarship on or applicable to humility as a virtue of elected public officials. I argue contemporary scholarship on humility in elected public officials systematically suffers from three shortcomings. First, scholars have presented accounts of humility that are, at best, underdeveloped, and, at worst, untenable. Second, scholars have fixated on the cognitive or intellectual aspects of public office, such as policy debate and decision-making. Third, scholars have not addressed the prima facie inconsistency between humility and the demands of running for elected office. In Chapter III, I address the first concern. There I proffer an account of humility that locates the virtue in a transcendent orientation to the self and others. In Chapter IV, I respond to the second two shortcomings of previous scholarship drawn out in Chapter II. First, I demonstrate how the transcendent account of humility is morally informative of the cognitive as well as the noncognitive aspects of public office. Second, I show how the transcendent account of humility is compatible with, and morally informative of, the required behaviors of running for elected office. Finally, in Chapter V, I suggest how humility might be enhanced in the United States Congress. I argue that the Code of Ethics for Government Service ought to be expanded to include humility and suggest ways this might be done. I argue that narratives of humble legislators ought to be distributed as a means of developing humility in members of Congress. I argue that partisan seating ought to be disrupted to encourage interaction among diverse members of Congress. I argue that C-SPAN tends to promote vanity and ought to be replaced with a less harmful means of securing transparency in Congress. 

Master's Thesis

The term American Exceptionalism is used to designate political myths purporting the qualitative distinction of the United States to other nations in terms of prowess, virtue, and spirituality. I argue that American Exceptionalism should not be viewed as a single political myth but as a metamyth constituted by four logically independent myths of American Exceptionalism. These myths center around the notion that America has a unique spiritual condition; that America is uniquely developed, structured and/or capable; that America has a unique or superior moral quality; and that America ought to behave as a moral example to other nations. I refer to these as American Spiritual Exceptionalism, American Performative Exceptionalism, American Moral Exceptionalism, and American Moral Exemplarism respectively. I also posit that there is a non-mythical belief in the uniqueness or superiority in America’s performance or moral quality. I call this view American Existential Exceptionalism. To determine if there is evidence that these notions of American Exceptionalism are believed in isolation to each other conducted a correlation test passed on a 29-item survey questionnaire meant to gauge belief in these five notions. Further, I hypothesized that a four-factor model is a better fit for the notion of American Exceptionalism than a single-factor model. To test this, I conducted two Confirmatory Factor Analyses and compared their results. The results suggested that the four-factor model is a better fit than the one-factor model. 

Stages of Research