Here are some things I wrote back when I was an aspiring academic. Read at your own risk.*

*Actually, I now realize that most of these papers are sitting on an external hard drive somewhere, so this will have to wait.

Practical Cognitivism: An Essay on Normative Judgment

This is the dissertation that I wrote between roughly 2012-2018. It started off as an interminable second-year paper which kept expanding. My original question was whether there could be such a thing as “truth” or “objectivity” in ethics. This led me to think more deeply about more fundamental questions, such as: Why do we care whether some domain is “objective”? What do we mean when we call something “true”? How is our thinking in ethics like, and unlike, our thinking in other domains, such as science or mathematics or art? And how do our ethical convictions relate to our actions, intentions, and life plans (what I called “practical commitments”)?

In writing this dissertation I was deeply influenced by the work of Christine Korsgaard and Allan Gibbard, two of my mentors and members of my thesis committee. I was also much helped by Selim Berker and Derek Parfit, the other half of my committee. My views about ethics have shifted and matured since the years I spent working on this, largely in response to my engagement with ethics from the perspective of Buddhist practice. I hope to write more about that some day. So, I don’t know to what extent I would still endorse the view that I here call “practical cognitivism.” (The nice thing about not being an academic is that you can be content with this “I don’t know” — there is less pressure to attach yourself to a particular idea or position for the sake of making a career.)