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.

Works in progress are thematically organized; published work (included abstracts and links) is in chronological order at the bottom of the page). Use the links immediately below to quickly jump to a project:
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book manuscript:
​Rewriting Rights

A monograph arguing that we should think of epistemic risk of violating others' rights as presenting us with a moral coordination problem, and developing a view of what our rights demand of each other that is essentially social, mediated by convention, and communicated through social signals. The first half of the book outlines the view and mechanics, and the second half applies it to solve longstanding problems in the ethics of consent, and self-defense, and discusses issues related to changing pernicious social norms.

Jump to Book Manuscript: Rewriting Rights

moral rights

Papers on how social conventions and our epistemic limitations affect what kinds of moral rights we have, and how we change them, specifically concerning consent, defensive harm, and (putative) rights to do wrong.

Jump to papers on moral rights

Prediction, inference, & Belief

These papers are applied epistemology in a range of social and political contexts: ethics of belief, inferences based on social groups, algorithmic sentencing, predictive policing, and moral encroachment.

Jump to papers on predictive inference

Language

Papers in philosophy of language, mostly concerning semantics & pragmatics of slurs, epithets, metalinguistic negotiation, and delimiting the linguistic community.

Book Project: rewriting rights

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Chapter Summaries

1. Problems of Ignorance: Mistakes are Made
Sets up the focus of the book: what does it take to respect rights, when we can’t track others’ intentions, and so cannot observe facts like whether they intend to consent, or are culpably attacking us? I call these “Normative Opacity Problems”: decisions in which it is opaque to the actor whether the other agent has acted to change what their rights require of her.

2. Rewriting Rights
Moral theory standardly treats normative opacity problems as moral “guessing games”: a decision problem for one agent acting under uncertainty. I argue that in fact they are structured more like cooperative signaling problems, and the optimal solution will involve coordinating the behavior of the agents involved. Representing them as problems for individuals loses important information about the social structure of the moral issues, and the shape of the needed solution.
​
3. What Rights Require
Argues that neither framing rights as requiring agents to act to achieve certain fact-relative outcomes, nor (alternatively) as requiring only that they deliberate and act according to particular evidence-relative standards, yields a characterization of the rights-holders’ entitlements that will fulfill the four signature theoretical roles of rights (correlativity, security, fairness, and guidance). So we need a new approach.

4. The Social Approach
​Instead of characterizing rights wholly in terms of the rights-holder’s interest (as an outcome-relative perspective does), or wholly in terms of the duty-bound’s deliberative ability (as an evidence-relative perspective does), I propose framing the contents of rights-claims cooperatively. The core of the account is a communicative signaling convention, supported by a social norm which takes signaling that you have exercised a normative power to be a way of in fact exercising that power. What agents owe each other is good-faith cooperation to avoid mistakes. This characterizes rights as fact-relative, but responsive to agents' epistemic limits. If the signaling convention is appropriately constrained, rights-holders have no moral complaint against mistakes resulting from their own signaling behavior; reactive agents are responsible for all other errors, though they may be blameless given their evidence. The chapter ends with a discussion of the necessary moral constraints for a functional normative signaling convention.

5. The Story for Consent
The central question for settling which mistakes a society should count as reasonable is whether the standard as implemented in the actual world will distribute the risks and costs of mistakes fairly. This chapter compares popular individualist accounts of consent (mental state, hybrid, and performative accounts) with the social signaling account. It demonstrates that given the strong gender bias in mistakes about consent, a standard that guides agents to follow their best guess on their evidence will compound, rather than address, the unjust concentration of mistakes. By contrast, the social approach creates space to explicitly evaluate and reject the heuristics which lead to the disproportionate distribution of errors.

6. The Story for Self-Defense
This chapter demonstrates that communicative signals can be used to resolve opacity problems involving uncooperative agents (like aggressors). It then shows that given the racial biases ​in threat-perception,  a standard that guides agents to follow their best guess on their evidence (as extant accounts of the morality of defensive harm do) can be expected to compound, rather than address, the unjust racial distribution of mistaken self-defensive harm.  Once again, the social approach brings the heuristics responsible for this effect into focus, and condemns them as failing the basic moral constraints for a signaling convention. 

7. Moral and Political Obligations under Uncertainty
Argues that (1) the Social Approach genuinely characterizes the contents of agents’ moral rights, rather than merely justifying a policy of acting-as-if. And (2), if overcoming the threat posed by normative opacity requires a degree of social coordination that individuals acting alone cannot bring about, the state's duty to protect its members' rights grounds an obligation for it to create and sustain the necessary communicative social conventions. I suggest that part of the function of the courts is to articulate and maintain these conventions. Given the significance of determinations of reasonableness for individuals’ enjoyment of their rights, we finally address the question that prompted the whole inquiry: what must we do when the burdens of normative opacity fall disproportionately on vulnerable subgroups of our community? 

8. Stewards of our Norms: Upshots for Law, Protest, and Policing
Communicative conventions aren't just the most appropriate way to adjudicate rights under normative opacity; they're what we already use.  Recognizing this, we must resist unreflectively adopting the communicative conventions of a dominant, politically empowered group, and instead evaluate how it distributes the costs of opacity throughout the community. ​The chapter closes with discussions of (1) the ways that discourse about mistakes reinforce the informal social norms that stabilize communicative conventions; (2) the role of protests like `solidarity hoodies', BLM, and Slutwalk in destabilizing unacceptable signaling conventions;  and (3) how the special role of signaling explains why many forms of information that make it rational to believe that someone has exercised a moral power do not make it reasonable to assume that they have. I end with some gestural comments about how the standard for reasonable mistakes outlined in this book should inform our evaluation of police use-of-force decisions under opacity.
 I am currently writing a book on moral rights under uncertainty. The working title is Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context.

If you want more information about the book, or are interested in participating in a workshop on the manuscript, please do feel free to email me (bolinger@princeton.edu).

moral rights, Consent, and Self-defense

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Published work in this research project: 
Work in progress on this project: a monograph, Rewriting Rights (see 'book')
  • Epistemic Risks & Objective Rights (draft available)
  • The Case for Conventional Defensive Permissions (draft available)
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.
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.

Predictive Inference and belief: Personal and Political

This branch of my research centers of questions about how others' moral claims affect what epistemic and evidential policies are permissible, both for individuals and political organizations. The main applications explored are stereotype-conforming inferences, ​ethics of testimony, statistical evidence, and predictive policing.
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Published work in this research project: (scroll down for abstracts)
Works in progress in this project:
  • Algorithms and the Individual in Criminal Law (draft available)
  • ​Predictive Policing & Fair Risk Distributions (early draft)
  • The Ethical Imperative of Transparency in Policing (talk)
  • Are we entitled to be believed? (talk)
Picture
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!
Algorithms and the Individual in Criminal Law ​(Previous title: What is the right to individualization?)
[working paper draft - subject to future revision]
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 distribution of the burdens and benefits of the rule of 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.
Predictive Policing and Fair Risk Distributions
[working paper, draft available on request]
Policing is fundamentally a project in social risk management, justified to each individual by how the practices of policing improve her prospects against suffering a rights-intrusion (from private or state actors). Given this, whether “predictive policing”—which I’ll here understand as relying on an algorithmic prediction model to guide arrests or police deployment—is morally justifiable depends not just on whether it is effective at reducing crime rates or increasing the odds that an offender will be arrested, but on whether it satisfies the relevant principles of distributive justice for risk. But so long as the most descriptively predictive variables track depressed socioeconomic conditions and antecedent victimization, using these tools will concentrate the risks posed by police activities on groups who are already disadvantaged, and so will need to provide them significant offsetting advantages if they are to be justified. Whether they do is an empirical question, but I think there is significant reason for doubt.

The Ethical Imperative of Transparency in Policing
​Authorizing an organization to harmfully interfere with or intimidate people is prima facie wrong. So what could justify it, in the case of (idealized) policing? The justifying goods of law-enforcement seem to be roughly these: preserving the rule of law, securing people from violent intrusions of their rights, and securing them from unjust domination by threats of force. I argue that these are risk-reduction benefits: the benefit received by the majority of people is not that a victimization they would otherwise have suffered is directly prevented, but that their risk of being victimized is reduced through the various activities of law-enforcement. This has several significant implications: (i) rather than viewing police as prima facie morally authorized to use the means necessary to most efficiently prevent the greatest number of victimizations, they are constrained by principles of distributive justice; (ii) theorizing about the morality of individual self-and-other defense is not a good guide to the moral permissions of police; and (iii) it is imperative not only that the laws be public, but that police policies concerning suspicious behavior, as well as patrol records and disciplinary data, be open to public scrutiny.

philosophy of language

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Published work in this research project  (scroll down for abstracts/links):
​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.
​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.

published & forthcoming work

2021. The Language of Mental Illness
in Khoo and Sterken (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language
[pre-typeset PDF]  (Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.)
  • 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.
2021. #BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief
Forthcoming in NOMOS, Fall 2021 issue on "Truth and Evidence"
[Final Author's Draft, PDF] (Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.)
  • ​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. 
2021. Explaining Justificatory Asymmetries between Statistical and Individualized Evidence
in Hoskins and Robson (eds.) in The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials (Routledge)
[pre-typeset PDF]  (Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.)
  • 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.
2020/forthcoming. The Moral Grounds of Reasonably Mistaken Self-Defense
Early View at Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, DOI: 10.1111/phpr.12705
[pre-typeset PDF on philpapers]  (Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.)
  • 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.​
 2020/forthcoming. Metalinguistic Negotiation in Moral Disagreement
Early view at Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2020.1850336
[Pre-typeset PDF] (Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.)
  • 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.
2020. Varieties of Moral Encroachment 
Philosophical Perspectives, 34 (1): 5-26.  DOI:10.1111/phpe.12124
​[Pre-typset PDF]
  • 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
2020. Contested Slurs: Delimiting the Linguistic Community
Grazer Philosophische Studien, 97(1): 11-30.  special issue on Non-Derogatory Pejoratives (Cepollaro and Zeman, eds.), DOI: 10.1163/18756735-09701003
[pre-typset PDF] 
  • 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. ​ ​
2020. Strictly Speaking
Analysis (2020) 80 (1): 3-11.  Co-authored with Alexander Sandgren. (Philpapers link) DOI: 10.1093/analys/anz017
[pre-typeset PDF]  
  • 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.
2019. Moral Risk & Communicating Consent
Philosophy & Public Affairs, 47 (2): 179-207 . https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12144
[pre-typeset PDF]  
  • 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 (Published online 2019). Special issue on Norms for Risk (Bolinger, Hájek, and Lazar, eds.) doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02372-w 
[pre-typeset PDF] 
  • 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.
2018/2020. The Rational Impermissibility of Accepting (some) Racial Generalizations
Synthese, (Published online 2018). doi: 10.1007/s11229-018-1809-5 .  Read online here; no paywall. (philpapers link)
  • 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, 25 (2): 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, 95 (1): 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.
2015/2017. The Pragmatics of Slurs
​Nous, 51 (3): 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

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