T y R a t e r m a n
3601 Pacific Avenue
Stockton, CA 95211
Office: Wendell Phillips 207
Email: traterman {at} pacific {.} edu
Phone: (209) 946-7624
Statement of Research Interests
My broad research interests are in ethics, social and political philosophy, and environmental philosophy. The dissertation I've written dips into each of these areas. It looks at the normative foundations of the economic approach to valuing non-market goods, especially environmental goods (clean air, water, and soil, undeveloped wilderness, clear vistas, individual animals and animal species, etc.) as well as human health and life. In other words, I'm appraising the theory of value underpinning cost-benefit analysis. (More on the dissertation can by found here.)
Solving a philosophical puzzle can be extremely rewarding and worthwhile even where there is no obvious practical upshot. But I most enjoy philosophy when I'm able to start with questions that bear directly on how we live and then develop careful, nuanced theoretical accounts in the service of these questions. I find many philosophical issues in public policy to be particularly engaging. Indeed, concurrent with my graduate studies in the Philosophy Department, I obtained Master's-level education in Public Policy. (The Department of Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill does not have a terminal Master's program, but offers what it calls a "Ph.D. Minor" to students enrolled in other departments who do sufficient Master's-level coursework in Public Policy.) I also have a background and abiding interest in psychology, and this regularly manifests itself in my work. This is, I believe, no small part of why, of all the philosophical questions out there, those in ethics and political philosophy are the ones I find most alluring.
My research focus for the near future will include unfolding in considerable detail several projects that are begun in my dissertation. One of these is to articulate a compelling theory of value that is naturalistic but non-anthropocentric, and if subjectivist at least not naïvely so. Almost all environmental ethicists join together in wanting a moral theory that is non-anthropocentric, but too often they have taken this to require a "mind-independent" value theory. I'm intrigued by the idea of mind-independent value, but suspect that the philosophical quest for it will come up empty, and thus I'm thinking about a view on which the value of a thing (state, process, etc.) is tied to evaluative attitudes that individuals have with respect to the thing. "Tied to" is not a sufficiently refined phrase, so this is among the aspects of the theory that I'd want to elaborate; but in general terms the attitudes would be argued to create rather than merely detect and respond to value. On the view I envision, it is not necessarily the case that humans alone would possess the relevant attitudes, which is roughly to say some non-humans should be able to count, as it were, as sources of value. But conditions under which a thing's value and an individual's attitudes towards that thing hang together will need to be carefully specified, and these conditions may differ according to whether the individual bringing the attitude to bear is a human or a non-human animal.
The question of whether value would, on this kind account, necessarily be monistic is one I begin to explore in my dissertation, but it is a complicated one and I would like to delve deeper into this issue. Both cost-benefit analysis and free-market environmentalism hold that the value of many goods that most people (I believe) think of as priceless can in fact be expressed monetarily. They tend to believe that environmental goods are merely resources, i.e., essentially just commodities, albeit ones we should use wisely and sometimes have a tough time bundling up and assigning rights to. As it turns out, however, even the free-marketeers tend to concede that there are certain things that are not properly regarded as mere resources. I'm enticed by the idea that environmental goods -- many of them, at least -- are in some fundamental way different from mere commodities, and thus I'm interested in thinking about what needs to be true of something in order for it to be a commodity.
Another project I'll be engaged with is not so much started in the dissertation as it is simply identified there and then set aside. While the dissertation does not deal much with questions concerning right action -- self-consciously, it deals instead primarily with questions in value theory -- questions of rightness, choice, justice, and the like are nonetheless extremely interesting to me. Thus, another project that I've touched on and would now like to develop much more fully is a conception of rational choice that does not require the values of all the things gained and lost through the choice to be expressed in identical units. A powerful tradition in philosophy (and disciplines like economics too) maintains that rational choice is possible only where there is one scale along which the value of each option can be at least ordinally ranked. I'm interested in a defensible account of rational choice (or perhaps "justifiable" or "reasonable" choice, or something along these lines), both at the level of the individual and -- of special interest to me -- also choice among public policies, that does not require all gains and losses to be commensurable, which is to say assessable along some one single scale. This is important, since I believe that, alas, gains and losses are not all commensurable. I'd like to work on developing criteria for the political and legal justification of regulations and public investments where the criteria involve something other than showing that the decision is expected to maximize some one single kind of value.