RENÉE JORGENSEN
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employment

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Princeton University. Sept 2019 - present
​Assistant Professor in Politics and the University Center for Human Values (joint appointment)
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Australian Catholic University (part-time appointment, 2020-2022)
Research Fellow in the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy
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The Australian National University. Sept 2017 - July 2019
​Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences 
full CV (pdf)

research areas

Social & Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Ethics, Philosophy of Law, Epistemology

reasearch

published work
Click on '+' next to a title to see links to the paper (where available), abstract, and presentation information.
in press or forthcoming
'Metalinguistic Negotiation in Moral Disagreements, in Inquiry
The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ought, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over oughts in non-cooperative contexts are best understood in the framework of metalinguistic negation, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt a semantics that allows variance in the meanings of oughts.
  • Central meeting of the American Philosophical Association (colloquium), St. Louis, February 2015
'The Moral Grounds of Reasonably Mistaken Self-Defense', in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents' entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm.  I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can take.​​​
  • University of Queensland Philosophy Seminar, March 2019
  • Australian National University Thursday Seminar, February 2018
  • Manchester Center for Political Theory (MANCEPT), Panel on Risk & Uncertainty, September 2016
  • Harvard Graduate Political Theory Conference, October 2015
'Varieties of Moral Encroachment', in Philosophical Perspectives (a supplement to Nous)
Several authors have recently suggested that moral factors and norms `encroach' on the epistemic, and because of salient parallels to pragmatic encroachment views in epistemology, these suggestions have been dubbed `moral encroachment views'. This paper distinguishes between variants of the moral encroachment thesis, pointing out how they address different problems, are motivated by different considerations, and are not all subject to the same objections. It also explores how the family of moral encroachment views compare to classical pragmatic encroachment accounts.

​[author's submitted version]​
Presented at:
  • Boston University, Ethics Seminar Series, Oct 2019
  • University of Cologne Ethics and Beliefs Workshop, June 2019
‘Contested Slurs: Delimiting the Linguistic Community’, Grazer Philosophische Studien. 97 (2020): 1-22. Special issue on Non-Derogatory Pejoratives, Cepollaro and Zeman, eds.
Sometimes speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, but which other members of that community do. Sometimes these speakers are ignorant or naïve, but not always. This paper explores a puzzled raised when some speakers stubbornly maintain that a contested term t is not derogatory. Because the semantic content of a term depends on the language, to say that their use of t is semantically derogatory despite their claims and intentions, we must individuate languages in a way that counts them as speaking our language L, assigns t a determinately derogatory content in L, and still accommodates the other features of slurs’ linguistic profile. Given the difficulty of doing this, there is some reason to give a non-semantic analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs. Along the way, I suggest that rather than dismissing the stubborn as semantically incompetent, we would do better to appeal to expected uptake as moral reasons for the stubborn to adjust their linguistic practices. ​ ​

[author's submitted version] 
Presented at:
  • University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar, March 2019
  • Australasian Association of Philosophy/New Zealand Association of Philosophy Joint Conference, July 2018
‘Explaining Evidential Asymmetries between Statistical and Individualized Evidence’, in Truth and Trials: Dilemmas at the Intersection of Epistemology and Philosophy of Law, Hoskins and Robson (eds.), Routledge.
In some cases, there appears to be an asymmetry in the evidential value of statistical and more individualized evidence. For example, while I may accept that Alex is guilty based on eyewitness testimony that is 80% likely to be accurate, it does not seem permissible to do so based on the fact that 80% of a group that Alex is a member of are guilty. In this paper I suggest that rather than reflecting a deep fact about the content of types of evidence, this asymmetry might arise from the moral features of the relation between the source of evidence and the target’s agency. While relying on statistical evidence plausibly raises the stakes of error by introducing new kinds of risk to members of the reference class, paradigmatically “individualized” evidence—evidence tracing back to A’s voluntary behaviour—lowers the stakes of error. Plausibly the degree of evidential support needed to justify accepting a proposition as true depends on the stakes of error. If so, then these facts explain the apparent evidential asymmetry without positing a deep difference in the brute justificatory power of different types of evidence.​

[author's submitted version]
Presented at
  • Virginia Tech, Philosophy Colloquium, April 2019
  • Australian National University Economics & Philosophy Workshop, November 2017 
‘The Language of Mental Illness’, in Khoo and Sterken (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language.
This paper surveys some philosophical issues with the language surrounding mental illness, but is especially focused on pejoratives relating to mental illness. I argue that though 'crazy' and similar mental illness-based epithets (MI-epithets) are not best understood as slurs, they do function to isolate, exclude, and marginalize members of the targeted group in ways similar to the harmfulness of slurs more generally. While they do not generally express the hate/contempt characteristic of weaponized uses of slurs, MI-epithets perpetuate epistemic injustice by portraying sufferers of mental illness as deserving minimal credibility. After outlining the ways in which these epithets can cause harm, I examine available legal and social remedies, and suggest that the best path going forward is to pursue a reclamation project rather than aiming to censure the use of MI-epithets.​​

​[author's submitted version]
Presented at
  • New York Philosophy of Language Workshop, Dec 2017 
  • Central meeting of the American Philosophical Association (symposium), Kansas City, March 2017
2019
'Moral Risk and Communicating Consent', Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 47, No. 2 (2019): 179-207.
[10.1111/papa.12144 ​] or [author's submitted version]
In addition to protecting agents’ autonomy, consent plays a crucial social role: it enables agents to secure partners in valuable interactions that would be prohibitively morally risk otherwise. To do this, consent must be observable: agents must be able to track the facts about whether they have received a consent-based permission. I argue that this morally justifies a consent-practice on which communicating that one consents is sufficient for consent, but also generates robust constraints on what sorts of behaviours can be taken as consent-communicating.
Presented at
  • Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society 2019 Meeting, New Orleans.  March 28-30 2019
  • Victoria University of Wellington, September 2018
  • Melbourne Applied Philosophy Seminar, March 2018
'Demographic Statistics in Defensive Decisions', Synthese (2019).
doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02372-w [or author's submitted version]
A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: (i) most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, (ii) even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, (iii) even if they did, they introduce new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but (iv) even if they didn't, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents' negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication.
'Strictly Speaking', Analysis Vol. 80, No. 1 (2020): 3-11; published online 2019. Coauthored with Alexander Sandgren. ​​
[doi: 10.1093/analys/anz017 ] ​​or [author's submitted version]
A type of argument occasionally made in metaethics, epistemology and philosophy of science notes that, since most ordinary uses of a given term do not satisfy the strictest interpretation of the term, most ordinary assertions involving it are false. This requires there to be a presumption in favour of a strict interpretation of expressions that admit of interpretations at difference levels of strictness. We argue that this presumption is unmotivated, and thus the arguments fail.
2018
'The Rational Impermissibility of (some) Racial Generalizations', Synthese (Published online 2018).
doi: 10.1007/s11229-018-1809-5​ 

I argue that inferences from highly probabilifying racial generalizations are not solely objectionable because acting on such inferences would be problematic, or doing so violates a moral norm, but because they violate a distinctively epistemic norm. They involve accepting a proposition when, given the costs of a mistake, one is not adequately justified in doing so.​
Presented at:
  • St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality, St. Louis, May 2017
  • Talbot Philosophical Society Colloquium, Biola University, November 2016 
  • Arche Graduate Conference, St. Andrews, October 2016
2017
'Revisiting the Right to do Wrong'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 95, No. 1 (2017): 43-57.
doi: 10.1080/00048402.2016.1179654​ ​
Rights to do wrong are not (contra Waldron, Enoch, and Herstein) necessary (even) within the framework of interest-based rights aimed at preserving autonomy. Agents can make morally significant choices and develop their moral character without a right to do wrong, so long as we either acknowledge supererogatory and minimally satisficing acts, or allow that there can be moral variation within the set of actions an agent is obligated to perform.  Furthermore, the intuition that in some cases individuals do have a right to do wrong can be explained as stemming from a cautionary principle motivated by the asymmetry between the risk of wrongly interfering and that of refraining from interfering.

Presented at:
  • UCLA Law and Philosophy Graduate Conference, October 2014
'Reasonable Mistakes and Regulative Norms: Racial Bias in Defensive Harm'. Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2017): 196-217. ​
doi: 10.1111/jopp.12120 ​
​A regulative norm for permissible defense distinguishes the conditions under which we will hold defenders to be innocent of any wrongdoing from those in which we hold them responsible for assault or manslaughter. The norm must strike a fair balance between defenders' security, on the one hand, and other agents’ legitimate claim to live without fear of suffering mistaken defensive harm, on the other. Since agents must make defensive decisions under high pressure and on only partial information, they will sometimes make mistakes. We have reason to want a norm that considers a mistake permissible when it was highly likely on the evidence that defense was proportionate and necessary to avert a threat. However, adopting an evidentialist norm under non-ideal conditions is treacherous business. I briefly survey empirical data suggesting that the type and extent of bias prevalent in the US renders a straightforward evidentialist norm unjust, and thus since the legal practice in the US relies on such a norm, we must explore avenues for reform. Preferably this will take the form of adopting a modified evidential norm, and I explore some promising options. If this proves impossible, however, then we have to accept a strict regulative norm (which does not consider any mistakes permissible), as the sole just alternative.
  • Political Violence Workshop, University of Connecticut, December 2015
'The Pragmatics of Slurs'. Nous, vol. 51 no. 3 (2017): 439-462; published online March 2015.
doi: 10.1111/nous.12090
It is standardly assumed that an adequate semantics of slurring terms must account for the peculiar embedding pattern exhibited by slurs, explaining why slurs often cause offense despite logical embedding. I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to purely pragmatic mechanisms akin to those at work in impoliteness phenomena. In short, in choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term (and its associations). Such an attitude is offensive, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker’s use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since such an explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of embedding patterns.
  • Princeton/Rutgers Graduate Student Conference, April 2013
  • Texas Tech University Philosophy Graduate Student Conference, April 2013
Book Reviews
  • Review of How Propaganda Works by Jason Stanley. Ethics, Vol. 127, No. 2 (2017): 502-507.

talks & conference presentations

works in progress​
Objective Rights and Epistemic Risks: Beyond Subjective Permissibility
This paper argues that our understanding of objective rights must be sensitive to agents’ epistemic limitations. On one popular understanding (which I call the `full-information fact-relative' interpretation), considerations about ignorance are relevant only to the `subjective permissibility' of an act, affecting culpability but not whether an act is a rights-violation. Against this view, I argue that subjective permissibility is not an adequate answer to the problems that agent ignorance poses for the deliberative and distributive roles of moral rights. If rights are to fill the theoretical role assigned to them, they must issue fact-relative permissions that are at least somewhat sensitive to agents' evidential and epistemic limitations.
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Workshop on Moral Rights, May 2019
  • Wuhan University Philosophy Seminar, October 2018
  • National University of Singapore, October 2018
  • University of Otago Philosophy Seminar, October 2018 
  • University of Melbourne Philosophy Thursday Seminar, August 2018
  • Australian National University workshop on Ethics & Risk, July 2018
Rewriting Rights: The Social Approach
​The usual ways of thinking about how ignorance affects what agents must do to respect each others’ moral rights frame this question as a problem in individual ethics, to be answered by settling whether an individual agent ought to do what is fact-relatively best, or what is best on her evidence. I argue that this is the wrong approach; we should instead understand rights as fundamentally social. I propose using resources from game theory to model agents’ rights as the demands players can reasonably make of each other in a multi-agent partial coordination game.
  • University College London, Political Theory Colloquium (invited), Nov 2019
  • Harvard University, Political Theory Colloquium (invited), Oct 2019
  • Princeton Workshop in Normative Philosophy (invited), Oct 2019
  • Princeton Political Theory Research Seminar, Oct 2019
  • Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, July 2019​
The Case for Conventional Defensive Permissions
On most accounts, whether it is morally permissible to harm someone in self-defense depends exclusively on whether doing so is necessary to avert a genuine threat for which they are responsible, or else is justified by lesser-evil considerations. Problematically, because they can't distinguish between genuine and merely apparent threats, these accounts leave agents prone to unintentional rights-transgressions, and fail to fairly distribute the risk of suffering unjust harm. I argue that this mischaracterizes agents' defensive permissions in a social context. Taking promissory obligations as a model, I show that there is moral reason to introduce a convention to mediate and extend agents' defensive permissions. Given the uncertainty that agents must act under, there is reason to permit defense against agents to avoidably act in ways that are conventional signals of aggression, even if (unknown to the defender) the threat is merely apparent.
  • Australasian Workshop in Moral Philosophy, January 2018
  • Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, Graduate Reading Retreat, November 2017
The Problem of the Mistaken Defender
There is widespread agreement that agents are justified in imposing defensive harm in at least some cases where they are reasonably mistaken about whether the threat is genuine (perhaps because the apparent aggressor is bluffing). Still, not every evidentially justified mistaken defense is permissible: in some cases (like McMahan's Mistaken Resident) the mistaken defender wrongs the apparent aggressor. I argue that none of the dominant accounts are able without supplementation to secure and explain the intuitive verdicts about the full range of cases of mistaken defense. At minimum we should look for an extension that identifies the moral feature that renders permissible mistakes permissible, links the permission in the right sort of way to the apparent aggressor's actions, and keeps the account from over-generating.
  • Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace Graduate Reading Retreat, September 2016
  • Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, Boulder, August 2016
Reporting Bad Beliefs: Solutions for Pragmatic Accounts of Slurs
Pragmatic accounts of slurs are characterized by commitment to the equivalence thesis: that slurs are semantically equivalent to their neutral counterparts. I present the three most common objections to pragmatic approaches stemming from this thesis: the equivalence problem, that it makes “all (NCs) are (slurs)” a conceptual truth; the substitution problem, that the view falsely predicts slurs may be substituted into intensional contexts salva veritae; and the conversational problem, that reports omitting slurs are intuitively incomplete and thus indicate that slurs differ from NCs in semantic content. I show that pragmatic theorists have adequate responses to each objection. The substitution problem relies on principles she is free to deny, while the equivalence objection is question begging. Finally, the conversational problem relies on delicate data that does not clearly support a semantic interpretation.
  • Pacific meeting of the American Philosophical Association (colloquium), San Francisco, March 2016
  • 9th Annual Northern Graduate Conference at Northern Illinois University, November 2015
The Specification Problem for Democratic Egalitarianism
The specification problem is a challenge to both specify the content of our egalitarian obligations, and justify these obligations on neutral grounds. I spend the majority of the paper illustrating how the problem arises for one particular relational egalitarian theory, defended by Elizabeth Anderson. After reviewing the obligations Anderson aims to justify, evaluating three strategies one may use to ground these particular obligations, and finding that they all fail to simultaneously specify our obligations and justify them on grounds that are neutral between conceptions of the good, I contend that this failure stems from a structural feature of relational egalitarianism in conjunction with a capabilities metric. Consequently, it illuminates a general problem for relational egalitarian theories with such a metric: either they can specify the content of our obligations, or they can ground our obligations in neutral principles, but they cannot do both.
  • Northwestern University Society for Theory in Ethics and Politics, March 2014

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