Research Overview
My research primarily concerns questions in ethical theory, moral psychology, and moral responsibility.
One major project defends a pluralist function-based account of blame. I argue that blame is defined in terms of a set of mutually reinforcing and jointly valuable functions, including protest, communication, and signaling. Crucially, I argue that this picture explains why blame is a valuable activity: it helps make better morally responsible agents in an efficient yet non-alienating way.
More broadly, I argue that reflecting on the functions of our moral concepts and practices can often lead to important insights across various philosophical topics. I endorse this approach in my publications about shame, intellectual humility, and intuitions.
Publications, Single-Authored
Response-Dependence in Moral Responsibility
American Philosophical Quarterly, 59(3), 273–285. 2022
Raises a “granularity challenge” against response-dependence accounts of moral responsibility: reactive attitudes are too fine-grained to ground facts about degrees of moral responsibility.
Shame and the Scope of Moral Accountability
The Philosophical Quarterly, 71(3), 544–564. 2021
Argues that shame is a reactive attitude and a way of holding oneself accountable for the substandard attitudes and character traits that we are morally responsible for.
The Communication Argument and the Pluralist Challenge
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 51(5), 384–399. 2021
This paper does two things: it argues that blame has multiple aims including moral communication and moral signaling, and it uses this pluralist view to challenge a common line of reasoning about morally responsible agency.
The Experimental Critique and Philosophical Practice
Philosophical Psychology, 31(1), 89–109. 2018.
Offers a response to the “negative project” in experimental philosophy: philosophical intuitions are often about general principles and are context-rich, unlike those case-specific intuitions often investigated in X-Phi.
Is Intuition Central in Philosophy?
The Philosophical Forum, 47, 281–296.
Draws an analogy between intuitive evidence and perceptual evidence.
Publications, Co-Authored
Sensitivity to Shifts in Probability of Harm and Benefit in Moral Dilemmas
Cognition, 209, 1–14, 2021
By Ryazanov, Arseny A., Shawn Tinghao Wang, Samuel C. Rickless, Craig R.M. McKenzie, and Dana Kay Nelkin.
In this collaborative project between philosophers and psychologists, we investigate the empirical psychology of moral judgments made under probabilistic scenarios. We find that, even with the same probability increase, participants are less likely to choose those actions that bring the probability of a harm closer to certainty.
Work in Progress
(Drafts available upon request. Please contact me by email.)
What is Counterproductive About Blame?
Suggests that there is a sense in which blame is “counterproductive”—but not because blame is inherently bad; instead, it is because blame’s different functions may be in tension with each other in certain non-ideal scenarios.
Intellectual Humility and Relationality
Defends a relational account of intellectually humility: to be humble, one needs to recognize other epistemic agent’s capacities, especially their capacities to engage in intellectual collaborations.
Blame: A Pluralist Function-Based Approach
Argues that blame is defined by a cluster of functions including protest, communication, and signaling.
On Functionalist Theories of Blame: From Kind to Tokens
I argue that current functionalist theories of blame face a difficulty because they focus on blame as a moral-psychological kind. I offer an alternative: defining individual tokens of blame in terms of the functions they are disposed to serve.