Political Thought
My book manuscript, The Flight From Dependence, contributes to a wide-ranging literature in political thought on social dependence and the nature of freedom. It examines three canonical modern accounts of freedom as autonomy and shows how each struggles to properly account for our social dependencies. Chapter I looks at John Stuart Mill, Chapter II Friedrich Nietzsche, and Chapter III Karl Marx. One of the central claims of the project is that despite acknowledging that human beings are socially dependent, each of these thinkers fails to connect that insight to their conception of freedom. This is not an unusual move. I argue that a flight from dependence in one form or another – often by insulating our insights into humanity’s social dependencies from our thinking about freedom – is characteristic of modern political thought in general. Unfortunately, this inclines us to devise standards of freedom that consistently ask for more independence than is humanly possible. Ultimately, in Chapter IV, I use concepts and tools from G.W.F. Hegel to argue that facing up to our dependencies requires coming to terms with the possibility that autonomy is the wrong way to think about human freedom.
I am also interested in related topics in political theory, especially justice and education. In my chapter J.S. Mill: Education, Freedom and Dependence I explain and analyze Mill’s liberal political philosophy of education.
In my review of Michael J. Thompson’s book Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism I discuss his and other recent attempts by critical theorists to reconceptualize autonomy.
Institutional Design
In my article with Sonia Maria Pavel Revoke the Charters: A Critical Reexamination of Charter Schools we develop a typology of the dominant arguments in defense of charters and then offer our critical assessment of each. We argue that charter schools not only fail to live up to their promises, but actually serve to undermine quality education. Although they purport to be equally accessible to all, charters covertly rely on morally arbitrary characteristics such as class, race, and disability in admissions. Ultimately, we conclude that charters unfairly reduce the quality of education for some students, thus resulting in substantively unjust outcomes.
In another article with Sonia, The Injustices of School District Fragmentation, we argue the provision of education through school districts should be understood as a form of mutual aid in which wealthier persons subsidize students from less affluent backgrounds. On these grounds, we suggest that school district fragmentation– i.e., the practice of breaking larger and typically racially and economically diverse districts into smaller one’s – violates the demands of justice. District fragmentation punishes students for characteristics beyond their control, namely the wealth of their parent(s)/guardian(s)
In my article Normative Concerns with High-Risk Pools I argue that using high risk pools in health insurance markets is both procedurally and substantively unjust. I do so by invoking Hegelian theories of recognition, Rawlsian notions of fairness, and more recent work in distributive justice from the legal literature.