Home Address

79 Harris Mountain Road, Granby, MA 01033       ebarnes@mtholyoke.edu        (413) 467-2439
 

Office Address

Porter Hall, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075       (413) 219-5380
 

Personal

Born: 1 December 1967, Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill                 Ph.D.                 May 1998
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill                 M.A.                  May 1992
Hampshire College                                                    B.A.                   January 1990

Employment

Director:  Debate, Empowerment,    Weissman Center for Leadership
    And Leadership Program                  at Mount Holyoke College                                 2000-present

Visiting Assistant Professor
    and Debate Coordinator              Mount Holyoke College                                         1999-present

Visiting Assistant Professor              Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Blacksburg, VA)        1998-99

Visiting Lecturer                              University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign              1997-98

Courses Prepared to Teach

• Advanced :  Ethics, Social Contract Theory, Philosophy of Law and the State, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Moral Responsibility and Free Will, Medical Ethics, History of Moral Theory

• Intermediate (In addition to the above): History of Modern Philosophy, Metaethics, History of Political Philosophy, Freedom and Oppression, Computer Modeling of Rational Choice, Philosophy of Mind, Action Theory, Decision Theory, Probability Theory, Rhetoric and Competitive Debate, Symbolic Logic, Philosophy of Economics, Peer Mentoring, Philosophy of Race and Racism

• Introductory (In addition to the above): Applied Ethics, Paradoxes of Philosophy, Critical Thinking, Speaking and Writing, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Business Ethics

Publications

Philosophy in Practice: Understanding Value Debate   Second Edition   (Perfection Learning Corp., forthcoming 2004, 330 pages)
       • An interdisciplinary textbook in speech & communications and moral & political theory

"Gauthier and a Contractarian Dilemma"  (in Twentieth Century Values, Kenneth F. T. Cust (ed.), American University Press, 2002)

"Reefer Madness: Legal & Moral Issues Surrounding the Medical Prescription of Marijuana"  (Bioethics , volume 14, issue 1, January 2000)

"Constraint Games and the Orthodox Theory of Rationality" (Utilitas, volume 9, issue 2, November 1997)

"Rationality, Dispositions, and the Newcomb Paradox" (Philosophical Studies, volume 88, number 1, October 1997)

Philosophy in Practice: Understanding Value Debate   (Clark Publishing, March 1996, 261 pages)
       • An interdisciplinary textbook in speech & communications and moral & political theory

Book Reviews

Review of Ruling Passions:  A Theory of Practical Reasons by Simon Blackburn  (Economics and Philosophy, volume 16, issue 2, October 2000)

Review of The Design Inference:  Eliminating Chance Through Small Probablities by William A. Dembski   (Ethics, volume 110, number 4, July 2000)

Papers and Conferences

"Do the Right Thing" — invited lecture and discussion series at Hampshire College focusing on three contemporary films that address contemporary moral and legal issues   (Spring 2003)

"Gauthier and a Contractarian Dilemma" — presented at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association  (May 1999)

"Gauthier and a Contractarian Dilemma" — presented at The 27th Conference on Value Inquiry  (April 1999)

"Reefer Madness:  Legal & Moral Issues Surrounding the Medical Prescription of Marijuana" — presented at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association   (April 1999)

"Reefer Madness:  Legal & Moral Issues Surrounding the Medical Prescription of Marijuana" — presented at the Propositional Attitudes Task Force, the philosophy faculty club of the Pioneer Valley Five Colleges (January 1999)

"Morality and Maximization" — to be presented at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (November 1998)

"Answering the Foole: Gauthier on the Rationality of Keeping One's Contracts" — presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (August 1998)

"Act Utilitarianism and Cooperative Utilitarianism" — presented at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (May 1998)

"Medical Marijuana Legalization and Civil Disobedience" — presented at the University of Illinois Law School (April 1998)

"Regan, Cooperation, and Morality" — presented at Utilitarianism Reconsidered, the conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies (March 1997)

"Act Utilitarianism and Cooperative Utilitarianism" — presented at the North Carolina Philosophical Society (February 1997)

"Constraint Games and the Orthodox Theory of Rationality" — presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (December 1996)

"Contractarianism, Consequentialism, and Constraint" — presented at the University of North Carolina (November 1996)

"Cooperation" — presented at the Propositional Attitude Task Force, the philosophy faculty club of the Amherst area Five College Consortium (April 1996)

"Playing Games Against Gauthier" — presented at the North Carolina Philosophical Society (February 1996)

"Gauthier, Parfit, and the Newcomb Paradox" — presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (December 1995)

"How Free Will is Possible" — presented at Hampshire College (April 1993)

"Kant and the Newcomb Paradox" — presented at the University of North Carolina (November 1992)

Comments Delivered at Conferences

Commentator on "Flipflopping and the Flavor of Responsibility" by Daniel Speak — to be presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (December 2000)

Commentator on "Gauthier and Hardin on the Conditions for Trust: Internalized vs. Externalized Constraints" by Celeste M. Friend — to be presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (December 1998)

Commentator on "Limited Autonomy: An Essay on the Prudence of Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma" by Mariam Thalos — a symposium paper presented at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (March 1998)

Commentator on "Armstrong on the Relation Regress" by Ümit Yalçin — at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (March 1995)

Completed Papers Currently Submitted for Publication

"Act Utilitarianism and Cooperative Utilitarianism" (Revise and Resubmit at Economics and Philosophy )

Works in Progress

"Dworkin and Scalia on Constitutional Interpretation: Understanding the Debate"
"Resolving the Contractarian Dilemma"
"Constraint and Two Kinds of Weakness of Will"
"Revisiting the Surprise Test Paradox"

Teaching Experience

Mount Holyoke College:  Cooperation, Competition, and Justice (seminar), Social and Political Philosophy, Ethical Theories and Issues, Medical Ethics, Mind and Action, Introduction to Philosophy, Competitive Debate, Peer Mentoring: Theory & Practice

Virginia Tech:  Ethical Theory (upper level undergraduate), History of Political Philosophy (upper level undergraduate), Morality and Justice [i.e., introductory ethics]

University of Illinois:  Contractarianism and Utilitarianism (graduate seminar), History of Ethics (graduate lecture), Philosophy of Law and the State (graduate lecture)

University of North Carolina (full responsibility) :  Introduction to Ethics, Symbolic Logic, Utilitarianism, Religious Issues in Philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy, Bioethics

University of North Carolina (teaching assistant) :  Introduction to Ethics, Symbolic Logic, Major Moral Theories, Metaphysics and Epistemology, Social and Political Philosophy

Dissertation

Title: "Cooperation and Trust: Puzzles in Utilitarian and Contractarian Moral Theory"

Committee: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and Michael Resnik (co-directors), Simon Blackburn, Thomas E. Hill Jr., Gerald Postema

         Utilitarians are often considered untrustworthy, because the only thing they care about is maximizing utility — even when doing so requires breaking a promise.  This prevents utilitarians from maximizing utility by precluding some cooperative ventures.  Rule utilitarianism and other variations on utilitarianism were supposed to solve this problem.  I argue that these problems needn't force us to abandon the more traditional act utilitarianism.  An increased understanding of moral psychology shows that agents can both subscribe to this theory and exercise the constraint necessary to keep promises.  In the most general terms, this is done by manipulating one's weakness of will and acquiring dispositions to be resolute.  These dispositions to be resolute allow act utilitarians to be trustworthy.  Given this, act utilitarianism can be shown to have unrecognized advantages over revisionist theories like rule utilitarianism and Regan's cooperative utilitarianism.

         Social contract theories run into similar difficulties with cooperation.  According to these contractarian theories, it is rational agents who negotiate and agree to the social contract.  But if rational agency is understood on the Hobbesian model (as it often is), then rationality is just doing whatever will best achieve one's goals (i.e., maximizing agent-relative utility).  In that case, it seems that it is sometimes rational to violate one's contracts, which constitutes a fundamental threat to the social contract.  To solve this problem, David Gauthier has proposed a new revisionist theory of rationality according to which it is always rational to abide by one's contracts;  but I demonstrate that this revisionist theory is seriously flawed.  Fortunately, the same considerations that allow act utilitarians to succeed when they need to cooperate also allow traditional Hobbesian agents to succeed.  This makes the revisionist theory of rationality unnecessary to social contract theory.

         These two problems are really the same problem, and the key to understanding it is that rule-following can have either a constitutive or a strategic role.  In other words, the revisionist claims that following the right rules makes an action right, while the traditionalist claims that rules and other dispositions are merely useful devices.  They disagree on a basic level, even though they agree that maximizing utility is the final goal.  Traditional theories claim that good reasons are all forward-looking, whereas revisionists claim that there are also backward-looking good reasons;  this dispute is central to normative theory.  I show that despite their apparent limitations, traditional theories not only solve the moral puzzles of cooperation and trust, they do so better than revisionist theories.

         The implications of this analysis extend into the applied fields of philosophy of law and political science.  In particular, the utilitarian theory of law has long been criticized for its inability to provide an adequate theory of rights.  I argue that act utilitarianism can endorse a system of rights that functions as a constraint on governmental utility maximization, even in cases where respecting rights fails to maximize utility.  For similar reasons, one can explain how rational (or moral) agents can effectively engage in deterrence by acquiring dispositions to follow through on threats.  The contentious claim here is that one can adopt and follow through on such a strategy while remaining a rational (or moral) person.  I illuminate this issue using the classic problem of nuclear deterrence.  My analysis of the strategies available within traditional utilitarianism and contractarianism opens up the possibility of solving these and other problems within the framework of traditional theories.

Master's Thesis

Title: "A Kantian Defense of Freedom"
Committee: Jay F. Rosenberg (Director), Dorit Bar-on, Keith Simmons

Fellowships and Grants

American Philosophical Association Service Learning Grant, 2003
Massachusetts Department of Education Grant (in partnership with the City of Springfield), 2002 - present
Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts Grant, 2001 - 2002
Kenan Summer Research Grant, Summer 1996
Department of Philosophy Dissertation Fellowship, Spring 1996
Philosophy Department Teaching Fellowship, Fall 1994 - Fall 1995
Graham Kenan Fellowship, Fall 1992
Henry Horace Williams Fellowship, Spring 1992
Mary Taylor Fellowship, Fall 1991
Bertha Colton Fellowship, Fall 1990 - Spring 1991

Professional Activities

Referee for American Philosophical Quarterly
Referee for Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Referee for Noûs
Referee for Erkenntnis
Referee for Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Faculty Liaison at the University of North Carolina
Colloquium Committee at the University of North Carolina
Session Chair at University of Illinois Graduate Student Conference
 

Service and Outreach

Founder and Director of the Springfield Urban Debate League and the DEAL Program   (2000 - present)
Organizor of regular student and faculty public debates at MHC (2000 - present)
Mount Holyoke College Debate Team, Coach   (1999 - present)
Director of Bates College Lincoln Douglas Debate Institute   (Summers, 1999 - present)
Faculty member at Wake Forest Forensics Institute   (Summer 1995)
Writing tutor at the UNC English Department Writing Center   (Spring 1994)
Debating coach at Chapel Hill High School   (1991-1995)

References

Simon Blackburn                Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
David Gauthier                   Distinguished Service Professor, University of Pittsburgh
Thomas E. Hill Jr.               Kenan Professor, University of North Carolina
Gerald Postema                  Cary Boshamer Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina
Michael Resnik                   University Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina
Jay F. Rosenberg                Taylor Grandy Professor, University of North Carolina
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord     Gillian T. Cell Professor, University of North Carolina
 

Teaching References

Jeanette Boxill                    Associate Chair/Teaching Coordinator, University of North Carolina
Keith Simmons                   Director of Graduate Studies, University of North Carolina
Eric Watkins                      Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Robert Wengert                 Chair of the Philosophy Department, University of Illinois

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