Research

My major project right now is a monograph on how uncertainty affects the contours of agents' moral rights. But ​I also have a couple different open research projects, pursuing various facets of the thought that we are responsible, in some sense, for the "public meaning" of our actions.

My published or forthcoming work is at the bottom of the page; for quick access, click here. For descriptions of working papers and my in-progress book manuscript, just keep scrolling.

A note on citation

For full-name references, please use 'Renee Jorgensen Bolinger'; for last-name-only references, please use 'Bolinger'. I'm using "Bolinger" as the last name, "Jorgensen" as middle name, following the convention invoked by Delia Graff Fara, who noted that "Judith Jarvis Thomson"/"Ruth Barcan Marcus" invoke the same convention.

work in progress

ethics of belief, profiling, statistical inference

My work on statistical evidence and profiling was featured in the podcast Hi-Phi Nation (Season 3, Ep1: The PreCrime Unit). Listen to the podcast (here) if you're interested!
Varieties of Moral Encroachment
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.

#BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief
​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (ms), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), that distorts our evaluation of women’s testimony concerning sexual assault. I conclude #BelieveWomen does not demand that we believe against the evidence, or uncritically, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. Rather, it aims to bring our trust closer to what is merited by the base-rate of reliable testimony from women concerning sexual assault. 

What is the Right to an Individualized Decision?
It is increasingly possible for law-enforcement agencies to leverage large datasets to build statistical models of the correlations between traits of interest (e.g. reoffending) and a wide array of other variables. Suppose such a model predicts that it is highly likely that Alex will reoffend. Would Alex have a moral or justice-based complaint against this being offered as evidence that Alex poses a danger to others? Some scholars (and courts) have said yes: relying on statistical evidence violates Alex's right to be "treated as an individual". This paper explores a few ways of filling in the foundation and content of a right to `individualized' judgment. I ultimately suggest that it is best understood as protecting agents' entitlement to a fair opportunity to avoid clashes with the law. If so then the right does not preclude the use of statistical methods for legal prediction per se. Rather, it requires that it be possible for citizens to act intentionally to avoid falling under heightened suspicion, which entails that they must be able (i) to anticipate which variables will be used as predictors, and (ii) to avoid them. Furthermore, it condemns reliance on various indexes of distributive injustice, or unchosen properties, as evidence of (actual or probable) law-breaking.

philosophy of language

​Reporting Bad Beliefs: Solutions for Pragmatic Accounts
​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.
Metalinguistic Moral Disagreements
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.
​Freedom from Free Contrastivism
With Maegan Fairchild
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has recently suggested that the best analysis of free is contrastive. To evaluate this proposal, we work out in more detail the defining features of a contrastive account. Drawing on the structure of contrastive analyses of knows and ought, we argue that contrast classes must display continued relevance and comparative dependence. We then show that while more free than may be contrastive, no contrastive analysis can respect the intuitive concept of free. Nevertheless, Sinnott-Armstrong’s proposed picture may yet be the best analysis of free: his account respects the contours of the intuitive concept, partly in virtue of failing to display features necessary to count as a contrastive analysis.

Book Project

I am currently writing a book on moral rights under uncertainty. The working title is Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context

Chapter Structure:
1. Problems of Ignorance: Mistakes are Made
2. What Rights Require
3. Rewriting Rights: the Social Approach
4. Answerability and Constraints
5. Managing Moral Risk: Consent and Self-Defense
6. Institutional Upshots of the Social Approach: Law, Policing, and War

If you want more information about the book, please do feel free to email me (bolinger@princeton.edu).

moral rights, defensive permissions

Epistemic risks & objective moral rights: 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.
Moral Self-Defense without Omniscience
Sometimes an agent D, acting on her best evidence, imposes defensive harm on an apparent aggressor A, but in fact A posed no genuine threat to D. When such a mistake is induced by A’s acting in a way that foreseeably appears threatening, A shares responsibility for the error, and has at most a diminished complaint of having been wronged. I argue that this is best explained by positing 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 social conventions: when individuals A behave in ways that conventionally signal that they pose a threat to an agent D, A cannot reasonably demand that D refrain from defensive action, so A has at most a diminished complaint against D’s defensive action. Since this account makes essential reference to the socially defined meaning of the marked signaling behaviors, I conclude that this gives us reason to think that the social context can make a difference to agents’ defensive permissions. 

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.

projects in infancy

The following are projects that aren't in draft form yet, but which I am working toward:
  • The political importance of transparency in policing decisions
  • Appropriate norms for police use-of-force decisions, drawing on discussions of appropriate civilian self-defense
  • The moral significance of risk-assumption and risk-seeking behavior
  • Short Skirts and Military Uniforms: how attire and foreseeable risk affect moral standing against suffering harms
  • A short paper on parallels between just war conventions and norms of civility

publications

 
 

forthcoming papers/chapters

RB_ContestedSlurs.pdf
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author's draft. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.
forthcoming. Contested Slurs: Delimiting the Linguistic Community
Provisionally forthcoming in Grazer Philosophische Studien, 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. ​ ​
forthcoming. The Language of Mental Illness
for 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.
Explaining Justificatory Asymmetries between Statistical and Individualized Evidence
for Hoskins and Robson (eds.) in The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials, (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.

Published work

2019. Moral Risk & Communicating Consent
Philosophy & Public Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12144
RB_CommunicatingConsent.pdf
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author's draft. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.
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.​
2019. Demographic Statistics in Defensive Decisions
Synthese, special issue on Norms for Risk (Bolinger, Hájek, and Lazar, eds.) https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02372-w
RB_DemographicStats.pdf
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author's draft. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.
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.
2019. Strictly Speaking
Analysis (2019). doi: 10.1093/analys/anz017 Co-authored with Alexander Sandgren. (Philpapers link)
  • 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 Accepting (some) Racial Generalizations
Synthese (2018). doi: 10.1007/s11229-018-1809-5 .   (Read online here; no paywall)
  • 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.​
2017. 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 .  (Philpapers link)
  • 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.  We have some 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, I survey empirical data suggesting that the type and extent of bias prevalent in the US renders such a norm unjust. ​​
​2017. Revisiting the Right to do Wrong
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 95 no. 1 (2017): 43-57.   doi: 10.1080/00048402.2016.1179654 . (Philpapers link)
  • 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.
2015. The Pragmatics of Slurs
​Nous, vol. 51 no. 3 (2017): 439-462. (Published online March 2015) doi: 10.1111/nous.12090 . (Philpapers link)
  •  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 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.

email

office
bolinger@princeton.edu
renee.bolinger@gmail.com
note: just one 'L' in 'Bolinger'
103 Fisher Hall

links
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PhilPeople
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address
​Department of Politics
Princeton University
001 Fisher Hall 
Princeton NJ
​08544-1012