Why do we have social norms—of fairness, cooperation, trust, property, or gender? Modern-day Humeans, as I call them, believe these norms are best accounted for in cultural evolutionary terms, as adaptive solutions to recurrent problems of social interaction. In this paper, I discuss a challenge to this "Humean Program." Social norms involve widespread behaviors, but also distinctive psychological attitudes and dispositions. According to the challenge, Humean accounts of norms leave their psychological side unexplained. They explain, say, why we share equally, but not why we disapprove of those who don’t. I defend the Humean Program against this challenge. In particular, I suggest an idea for how to extend the Program to account for the psychological side of norms. Socially adaptive behaviors aren’t just likely to emerge in a group; They’re also likely to be widely taught within it. The transmission of these behaviors through instruction explains why they're associated with distinctive normative attitudes and dispositions. These attitudes play a pedagogical role in helping transmit these behaviors to children and newcomers. PhilPapers.

In my dissertation, I solve various puzzles arising from the idea that social norms are rational equilibria, that is, rules such that following them is rational for each just in case they are followed by all. I argue that norm adherence is rational because norms are tied to cultural practices, i.e., socially learned ways of acting that mediate our access to social goods like reputation, esteem, and status. My advisor is Philip Pettit.

I solve a puzzle suggesting that one can’t be guided by constitutive rules of practices like chess or etiquette because these rules can’t rationalize one’s action. I argue that constitutive rules guide action by making it rational for one to rule out certain choice options.

A paper on the nature and origin of bad norms, e.g., norms demanding honor killings, foot binding, and FGM.

A paper on how social action (concerted or not) can lead to norm innovation, e.g., by creating norms against jaywalking, sexual harassment, and mansplaining.

A paper on moralism studying how moral practice can be distorted by social norms conferring status to people based on their perceived moral uprightness.

A paper on the social basis of intention arguing that rational constraints on intention emerge from social norms regulating the practice of public commitment.

A joint paper with Alejandro Vesga on euphemism. We argue that euphemism is a type of speech act where the speaker substitutes one expression for another in response to certain normative expectations on the part of her audience.

We argue that a set of attitudes is coherent just in case and because it is logically possible for the attitudes to be jointly satisfied in the sense of jointly fitting the world. We show how this account can help adjudicate debates about how to formulate various rational requirements. PhilPapers.

I argue that cases of incoherence due to mental fragmentation are counterexamples to the view that rationality doesn’t specifically demand that one be coherent, only responsive to one’s reasons. Request draft.

A paper on the aim of credence arguing that credences aim to match the evidential probabilities. Non-probabilistic credences are irrational, not because they are guaranteed to be accuracy-dominated (as accuracy-first epistemologists claim), but because they can’t be jointly satisfied.

A paper with Sam Fullhart on the normativity of coherence arguing that coherence requirements are genuinely normative under a commitment-involving conception of normativity. An agent who is incoherent fails in light of the commitments implicit in his own mental states.