In the dissertation, I consider the permissibility of a familiar set of responses to wrongdoing in our interpersonal relationships—those responses that constitute the imposition of some cost upon the wrongdoer. Some of these responses are, I argue, properly considered punishing, and some of these instances of punishing are in turn permissible. Punishment as I understand it is a broad phenomenon, common in and to all human relationships, and not exclusively or even primarily the domain of the state. Personal interactions expressive of wrong-reactive attitudes like disappointment, anger, and guilt will sometimes constitute punishment so understood. I consider childhood punishment, self-punishment, and punishment between friends, concluding that punishment in the context of our personal relationships may sometimes be appropriate where undertaken not for the sake of deterrence nor of retributive justice, but for the sake of the aims constitutive of the relationship in which it occurs.

My dissertation investigates the epistemic, moral, and political significance of open-mindedness. Its main goal is to argue that there is an imperfect duty of open-mindedness that sets moral and epistemic requirements on the structure of one’s agency.The common understanding of open-mindedness describes it as a purely epistemic virtue consisting for an individual to be willing to expose oneself, horizontally, to different views, and to cognitively engage with them. I argue that this purely epistemic, intellectual, horizontal, and individual conception is incomplete in several respects. First, open-mindedness comprises also a vertical dimension, oriented not only towards the broadening of one’s perspective, but also towards the deepening of one’s understanding; second, when the subject matter involves other people, vertical open-mindedness has a distinctively moral value; third, open-mindedness towards other people has a practical, action-oriented dimension, which calls for practical engagement and cooperation; finally, open-mindedness can sometimes be articulated also at the collective level, through the creation of structures and procedures embodying forms of institutional open-mindedness and fostering in turn individual open-mindedness. The basic idea is that there is something wrong with our agency if, in our cognitive engagement with a subject matter, and/or in our practical engagement with other people, our agency and our mind are not appropriately open to that subject matter, or to those people. The duty of open-mindedness does not necessarily require one to do some specific thing, in a given circumstance. It is an imperfect duty in the Kantian sense – it prescribes structuring one’s agency around certain values. My strategy to defend my view is twofold. First, I offer a general argument for what a duty of open-mindedness consists in and what its moral and epistemic grounds are. Second, I show that recognizing this duty would help us to better address specific problems in different areas of epistemology and moral philosophy. On the epistemic side, I argue that a duty of open-mindedness can help us give a fuller account of the requirements for well-formed beliefs, by appealing to the structure governing the direction of attention during inquiry. On the moral side, I argue that open-mindedness can help us explain our obligations to practically engage with people whom we are not related to yet, such as prospective co-workers and prospective co-citizens. This in turn provides further support for the idea that we should acknowledge a duty of open-mindedness and helps us spell out in more detail what open-mindedness consists in and its central role in the normative landscape.

This dissertation examines understudied aspects of the relationship between work, law, and moral agency. Liberal egalitarianism conceptualizes a just society as a fair system of social cooperation in which members can regard themselves and one another as social equals. Perhaps because workplaces have traditionally been loci of economic and status-based inequality, liberal discussions of the morality of work have tended to center on fair wages and nondiscriminatory access to work. While wages and access are important, liberal theory has neglected the moral agential dimensions of work, such as work’s influence over our personal identities and associational lives, and the law’s role in securing and communicating our social equality at work. That neglect is regrettable. Workplaces are some of the most pervasive and life-shaping venues for social cooperation, and the liberal ideal of social equality is not merely material. We should also—through our laws and major social institutions—treat one another as equal moral agents, and thus, as equally entitled to the social conditions we need to craft meaningful and moral lives.

Through four case studies, this dissertation illustrates how our legal construction and regulation of work can both compromise and support our equal moral agency. Chapter 1 examines legal norms of managerial control and argues that paid workplaces exert systemic pressures on worker expression. Chapter 2 criticizes agricultural guest worker programs for subordinating nonresidents’ agential interests in associational freedom to host countries’ desires for cheap labor. The second half of this dissertation then argues that workplaces are not merely threats to moral agency, but are also important sites for moral agency. Through discussions of volunteer work and religious workplaces, Chapters 3 and 4 explore the associational interests people have in workplaces as possible venues for sustained cooperation organized around shared values. These interests can be compromised by skill-based specialization and the inegalitarian moral views of employers. While these cases are not exhaustive, they illustrate how workplace equality is not simply material and comparative, but is also a kind of social relation to be fostered through equal consideration of our agential interests in exercising a wide range of expressive liberties.