Research
I work on a variety of issues in moral and political philosophy as well as philosophy of language. Both the pragmatics of normative language and the normative upshots of pragmatic communication fascinate me. I'm especially interested in questions relating to responsibility for the public meaning of our actions, as revealed in contexts of self-defense, promising, consent, and slur use.  
​

a quick clarificatory note on citation:

I'm using "Bolinger" as the last name, "Jorgensen" as middle name, following the convention invoked by Delia Graff Fara (who notes that "Judith Jarvis Thomson"/"Elizabeth Cady Stanton"/"Hillary Rodham Clinton"/"Ruth Barcan Marcus" invoke the same convention).
  • For full-name references, use 'Renee Jorgensen Bolinger'; for last-name-only references, use 'Bolinger'. Thanks!

publications
The titles below are linked to the paper on PhilPapers; the doi links will take you to the paper on the journal page.
The Rational Impermissibility Of Accepting Racial Generalizations, Synthese (forthcoming)
  • I argue that inferences from highly probabilifying racial generalizations (e.g. believing that Jones is a janitor, on the grounds that most Salvadoreans at the school are janitors) 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. First I sketch an account of the nature of adequate justification---practical adequacy with respect to eliminating the ~P possibilities from one's epistemic statespace. Second, I argue that inferences based on demographic generalizations tend to disproportionately expose group members to the risks associated with mistakenly assuming stereotypical propositions, and so magnify the wrong involved in relying on such inferences without adequate justification. 


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.
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 may be conceptually possible, but (contra Waldron, Enoch, and Herstein) they are not 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. Agents can also engage in non-trivial self-constitution in choosing between morally indifferent options, so long as there is adequate non-moral variation among the alternatives. 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.
 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.

working projects & papers

The papers below are in progress. For a draft, please email me (renee.bolinger@gmail.com).
Project: Uncertainty and Moral Rights
Uncertainty shapes the moral demands agents can make on each other. Many of our interactions involve actions that are permissible---perhaps even called for---if our assumptions about the moral landscape are correct, but violate someone’s rights if we are mistaken. The need to fairly distribute the risk and costs of these mistakes in a society gives us moral reason to adopt ``normative conventions'': social practices that mediate, and in some cases alter the contours of, agents’ rights. I’m especially interested in the conditions under which such conventions can attach morally significant public meanings to behaviors (e.g. consenting by nodding, promising by shaking hands, etc.), which make it morally permissible for others to treat the agent as having consented, promised, etc. Identifying constraints on normative conventions is theoretically fruitful, allowing us not only to better understand agents’ rights and permissions under uncertainty, but also to make progress on thorny questions about implicit consent, evidential strength, and the ethics of war.

Associated working papers:
  • The Problem Of The Mistaken Defender
  • The Moral Foundations Of Mistaken Defense
  • The Case For Conventional Defensive Permissions
  • Moral Risk And Communicating Consent
  • Risks & Rights: Beyond Subjective Permissibility
Project: Implications for Puzzles about Generalized Evidence
The rich structure of normative conventions carves out new space for accounting for the evidence-dependent flavor of some moral permissions while constraining what type of evidence can ground the permissions. Evidence that consists in observing A perform a signaling behavior (like drawing a weapon) is privileged: it undermines A's complaint against suffering the costs of a mistake. Evidence that is not privileged can make action rational, but does not render a mistake permissible, and so does not lower the moral stakes of error. This asymmetry grounds a powerful explanation of the apparently mismatched justificatory force of different types of evidence, (e.g. why observing A draw a weapon is stronger evidence than third-party testimony, which is stronger than facts about statistical odds given A's apparent group memberships), and gives a principled distinction between mistakes that are morally permissible given A's behavior, and mistakes that are only excused given S's evidence.

Associated working papers:
  • Demographic Statistics In Defensive Decisions
  • The Rational Impermissibility Of Accepting Racial Generalizations, Synthese (forthcoming)
  • Explaining The Justificatory Asymmetry Between Statistical And Individualized Evidence
Near Future Project: Implications for Just War and State uses of force
One of the next steps in my research is to extend the conclusions from civilian self-defense to implications for police use-of-force and military actions. This work will include a paper on the extent to which two signature commitments of classical Just War theory, the Moral Equality of Combatants (that combatants on each side are morally permitted to target and kill combatants on the other) and the Asymmetry thesis (that civilians are not legitimate direct targets, while combatants are) can be vindicated by my account, without taking on classical theory's more controversial commitments. Because normative conventions privilege a particular kind of evidence (signaling behaviors), the picture I offer can vindicate the Asymmetry thesis relatively straightforwardly.

Perhaps more surprisingly, it can also ground a restricted version of the Moral Equality of Combatants: so long as a combatant does not have good evidence that he himself poses an unjust threat, he is permitted (by the signal) to impose apparently necessary defensive harm on the armed combatants of the opposing side. With the exception of soldiers fighting patently unjust wars, this will result in a sort of parity of permissions to impose defensive and counter-defensive harm. Unlike the more standard justification, which grounds soldiers’ permissions in the right of a State to defend itself against unjust threats, the signaling story I propose need not first determine whether the group is organized enough to count as a State.
Slurs, Pejoratives, and Epithets
Racial, ethnic, and gender-based slurs are a clear instance of broader cultural meaning overruling a speaker’s particular intentions: we hold speakers responsible for the public meaning of the slurs they use, rather than only for what they directly intended to communicate. I have three papers in progress, and one published, on the mechanics of these terms. I also plan to pursue a variety of related questions in future papers, including the moral and theoretical significance of interpersonal phenomena like offense, ethical and legal questions concerning the kind of wrongs imposed by hate speech, and the appropriate social response to these wrongs.
Associated working papers:
Delimiting the linguistic community
Some slurring terms (like 'queer') are eventually reclaimed; some fade from use (like 'coolie'). Others are active slurs in other communities, but operate at a remove from that history in this linguistic community (like 'gypsy' in American English). It's not clear that terms in these stages derogate; if they do, they plausibly do so differently from paradigmatic current slurs. Often speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, while other members of that community do conceptualize it as one. Theorists have been quick to categorize such speakers as linguistically incompetent naive slur-users when the terms in question are current, potent slurs, but it's less obvious what we should say for terms in one of the murkier stages just mentioned. This paper explores puzzles raised by these more ambiguous 'contested slurs', and aims to characterize some options for which facts we should take to determine whether a term is a slur in a given language, despite widespread ignorance of this fact, versus failing to count as a slur because of the widespread ignorance.
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.
the Harm in Mental Illness Epithets
This paper aims to focus carefully on the topic of 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.