Research

My research can be divided into three overlapping themes (for links to papers scroll further down):

1) The epistemology of social progress:

I have recently completed a book manuscript titled Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress. It is currently forthcoming with Oxford University Press.  Here is a précis:

Over the past 70 years, the United States has been the site of several stunning moral advances on gender, sexual orientation, and race.  Democracy plausibly has something to do with this.  On its face, democratic governance embodies the promise of protest, voice, foment – in short, change.  And yet, as a new crop of skeptics has pointed out, democratic citizens tend to be ignorant, irrational, and easily manipulated.  Such anxieties have only grown with the recent surge of populism.  These observations present a critical set of challenges to the democratic ideal.  What exactly is the role of democracy in social progress?  What can this teach us about democracy’s defining principles and practices?  And how can we reconcile our democratic aspirations with the disappointing facts of real-world politics? 

This book offers a sustained answer to these questions, presenting the first philosophical account of social progress that focuses on democracy, and delivering an innovative rebuttal to skeptics inspired by the recent populist wave.  Following in the tradition of John Dewey (and J.S. Mill), the book’s big idea is that democracy enables progress through “experiments in living”: trying out new moral ideas and learning from the experience of acting on them.  Drawing on research in social psychology and several historical case studies – same-sex marriage, women’s integration into the workforce, and school desegregation – I show how transformations in social experience construct new links of emotion and identity across a democratic public.  And I show how these links enable diverse citizens to learn how to flourish together.  The key virtue of democracy, I argue, is not inclusive deliberation, the “wisdom of crowds,” or procedural fairness but, instead, the way that it allows us to continually re-invent our bonds as a moral community.

2) The epistemological dimensions of liberal democracy: As I argue in “Epistemic Democracy and the Social Character of Knowledge,” governance requires pooling and deploying an enormously diverse body of knowledge. Several of my published papers focus on the virtues of liberal democracy in achieving this task, and the normative implications of thinking about political organization in epistemic terms. For example, in “Epistemic Trust and Liberal Justification” I argue that the liberal norm of reason-giving is critical to achieving epistemic trust in the political context. And in “Democratic Consensus as an Essential Byproduct” I argue that valuable forms of political consensus derive from deliberation that aims at epistemic justification rather than consensus itself. Future work will focus on the tension between epistemic standards of political belief and democratic legitimacy as a function of popular consent. The key to resolving this tension, on my view, is recognizing that the truth about social morality is sensitive to — though not comprehensively defined by — the social distribution of beliefs and preferences as they vary across societies. I develop this last point most fully in “Epistemic Democracy Without Truth: The Deweyan Approach”

3) Philosophy of economics/business: I have become increasingly interested in bringing normative social thought to bear on economic aims and organizations. This has been facilitated by my involvement with the “Society for Progress” (http://societyforprogress.org) – an organization encompassing business scholars, social philosophers, executives, and economists – which is devoted to rethinking the relationship of business to social values. In “Contesting the Market,” I articulate a distinctive kind of threat that capitalism presents to democratic models of public contestation. In “New Prospects for Workplace Democracy?” (co-written with Julie Battilana and Mike Lee), my co-authors and I consider the relationship between workplace democracy and the balance between financial and social aims. I am presently at work on a book manuscript – Moral Capital (co-authored with Subi Rangan) – that offers tools for business executives to integrate moral reasoning into their organizational decision-making.

Publications

Books

  • Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

Articles

Reviews and reference entries

  • “Epistemic Proceduralism,” in The Routledge Guide to Social Epistemology, edited by Miranda Fricker, David Henderson, and Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pederson (2019)
  • “Philip Kitcher,” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd ed., edited by Robert Audi, Cambridge University Press (2015)
  • “Justice,” Springer Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, Anne Runehov and Lluis Oviedo eds. (2013)
  • “Book Review of Robert Audi, Moral Perception,” Faith and Philosophy 30 (2013): 476-479

Public engagement