Status is a positional good constituted by the positive approval of others on some evaluative dimension. Skeptics say that pursuing status is ultimately unfulfilling, that it mistakes what we want now for our own final good, that it confuses the approval of others with objectively valuable achievement, and that it puts us into relations of enmity with other humans. I believe these objections are mistaken, and that interrogating them turns up some meaningful virtues of status. Achieving status can confer narrative value. A moment of triumph can change the evaluative valence of the struggles and failures that preceded it. It can also alleviate pressure on future uses of one's agency. With security against sources of identity threat, agents have more latitude for exploration and risk-taking. Status can thereby help redeem the past as well as open up the future.

Social entrepreneurs face a dilemma. When making decisions about corporate giving, should they prioritize groups with whom they share some historical, national, or emotional tie or should they maximize the overall effectiveness of their contributions? According to a thesis I call “associationist priority,” the moral reasons to favor stakeholders with whom the entrepreneur shares an associative relationship trump the reasons to promote the impartial good. An important component of the argument for associationist priority is the premise that some nonvoluntary associations, including those between corporations and members of their communities, create special moral obligations. This essay argues against associationist priority by way of denying nonvoluntary associative obligations generally. This expands the moral discretion corporate social entrepreneurs enjoy both in how they give and to whom they give.

Gaslighting brings its victims to doubt the sources of their evidence. This article holds that political gaslighting, by leading citizens to hold beliefs disconnected from the available evidence, poses a distinctive threat to democratic politics. But holding “audacious beliefs”—beliefs that are ahead of the evidence—can serve as a core ingredient for democratic movements. This creates a dilemma for citizens, who must choose between two kinds of evidential policies. How can they protect themselves from gaslighting without rendering themselves insusceptible to the mobilizing efforts central to democratic politics? Citizens, then, face a standing challenge: to remain open to the bully pulpit while vigilant against the gaslighter's epistemic bullying.

Gaslighting brings its victims to doubt the sources of their evidence. This article holds that political gaslighting, by leading citizens to hold beliefs disconnected from the available evidence, poses a distinctive threat to democratic politics. But holding "audacious beliefs"-beliefs that are ahead of the evidence-can serve as a core ingredient for democratic movements. This creates a dilemma for citizens, who must choose between two kinds of evidential policies. How can they protect themselves from gaslighting without rendering themselves insusceptible to the mobilizing efforts central to democratic politics? Citizens, then, face a standing challenge: to remain open to the bully pulpit while vigilant against the gaslighter's epistemic bullying.

Do partisans view members of the other party as having lower moral status? While research shows that partisans view the out-group quite poorly, we show that affective polarization extends to expressing a willingness to sacrifice an out-partisan's life. We report the first study to consider partisanship in the classic "trolley problem" in which respondents are asked whether they would sacrifice an individual's life in order to save the life of five individuals. We explore this issue with a nationally representative survey experiment in the United States, inquiring about politicized variants of the trolley problem case. First, we vary the political affiliations of both the group of five (to be saved by turning the trolley) and the single individual (to be sacrificed by turning the trolley). We find that individuals are less willing to sacrifice a co-partisan for the sake of a group of out-partisans. These findings go beyond earlier work by suggesting that partisans not only hold negative attitudes and judgments toward political out-groups but also they will at least signal approval of differing moral treatment. We take stock of how these results bear on normative questions in democratic theory.

Political liberals believe that compliance with a norm of public reason facilitates the realization of cooperation and civic friendship among cocitizens. However, a developing literature in political psychology provides strong reasons for skepticism that public reason will equally ensure that women and men realize these values. Instead, the norm of public reason—at least in common specifications—favors characteristically male forms of deliberation. We propose supplementing public reason with a norm of rapport, which conceives of deliberation as an interactive engagement requiring proattitudes and actions from speaker and listener alike.

We can imagine agents who would have the moral status to demand contractualist justification but still lack an especially strong claim against interference. In contrast, agents who can conceive of their lives in a temporally unified way have a distinctive, strong interest in non-interference. This contrast helps illuminate the moral importance of self-authorship. The upshot is that ordinary persons have a more general and less variable right against interference than is often supposed. Self-authorship can also help appreciate the sense in which the value of persons may be characterized as 'self-existent'.

Social egalitarianism holds that individuals ought to have equal power over outcomes within relationships. Egalitarian philosophers have argued for this ideal by appealing to (sometimes implicit) features of political society. This way of grounding the social egalitarian principle renders it dependent on empirical facts about political culture. In particular, egalitarians have argued that social equality matters to citizens in political relationships in a way analogous to the value of equality in a marriage. In this paper, we show how egalitarian philosophers are committed to psychological premises, and then illustrate how to test the social egalitarian's empirical claims. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we find that citizens will sometimes prioritize equality over competing values, but that the weight of social equality diminishes when moving from personal to political cases. These findings raise questions for thinking about how to explain the normative significance of social equality.

Being open to persuasion can help show respect for an interlocutor. At the same time, open-mindedness about morally objectionable claims can carry moral as well as epistemic risks. Our aim in this paper is to specify when there might be duty to be open to persuasion. We distinguish two possible interpretations of openness. First, openness might refer to a kind of mental state, wherein one is willing to revise or abandon present beliefs. Second, it might refer to a deliberative practice, according to which one is willing to engage with opposing reasons. We suggest these two interpretations are conceptually and empirically distinct. Once disambiguated, we suggest that different contexts may make different forms of openness appropriate as expressions of respect.

Republican political theory has long feared the tyranny of uncontrolled power. While maintaining the tradition’s suspicions of concentrated power, neo-republicans regard the presence of a constitutionally limited political state as an essential constituent of nondomination. In this essay, I suggest that the summer protests of 2020 provide an occasion for scrutinizing philosophical idealization of the political state. If an image of the political state as a source of domination is placed alongside its usual image as the solution to domination, how would that revision affect neo-republican prescriptions? I consider this question specifically with respect to private ownership of firearms. This paper has two aims. First, I contend that private possession of firearms does not suffice for mutual domination. The neo-republican’s premises are inadequate to build an argument for gun control. Second, I make a positive case that when the state becomes a dominating power or complicit in domination, private possession of firearms can potentially offer a valuable source of antipower.

Since field experiments in democratic politics influence citizens and the relationships among citizens, they are freighted with normative significance. Yet the distinctively democratic concerns that bear upon such field experiments have not yet been systematically examined. In this paper, we taxonomize such democratic concerns. Our goal is not to justify any of them, but rather to reveal their basic structure, so that they can be scrutinized at further length. We argue that field experiments could be democratically objectionable even if they are not decisive – even if they do not swing the results of elections or other political decisions. Rather, if a class of campaign experiments is objectionable, one reason for this is that they undermine citizens’ equal standing. The ideal of equal standing affords nuanced judgments about the permissibility of field experiments in democratic politics.