Zoë Johnson King is a Bersoff fellow at NYU. She will be a fellow until August 2020. At that time, she will head West and become an Assistant Professor at USC. Zoë got her PhD at the University of Michigan. She mainly works on moral motivation.
What excites you about Philosophy?
I’m excited about the fact that Philosophy feels like a super-dynamic discipline right now. We’re still addressing versions of the same millennia-old questions, but we’re doing so in a more interdisciplinary and inter-sub-disciplinary way than ever before, drawing insights from all over the place to shed new light on some of those old questions. And we’re paying an ever-increasing amount of attention to philosophical work in intellectual traditions outside of the Western world. And we’re finally starting to realize the value of producing work that takes the central insights of whatever papers or topics or theories are generating a lot of interest within the academy and renders those papers or topics or theories accessible to people outside of the academy. In short, philosophy feels a lot less “ivory tower” and a lot more engaged with the rest of the world right now than it did when I first started undergrad, and I think it’s way better for it. All of that is super exciting.
What are you working on right now?
Oh my goodness, so many things! First, I have two papers that are kinda spin-offs of my doctoral research project that I’m hoping to finish this year. One started out being about culpable moral ignorance, and has ended up being partly that and partly a call to arms for quality-of-will theorists to think more about what it means to say that someone cares adequately about people and things that are in fact morally significant. The other paper started out being about moral deliberation, and has ended up being partly that and partly an exercise in moral metasemantics that tries to understand what it could be for someone to care about acting morally under another mode of presentation. I also have a side project in legal epistemology, and I’m working on two other papers as part of that; one about a certain kind of epistemic rationale for the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, and the other about why sensitivity and safety principles can’t explain our current legal practices regarding so-called “naked” statistical evidence. Lastly, I have a new paper on statistics and profiling that I’m co-authoring with my friend Boris Babic, who was in my year in grad school and has an MA in statistics — we’re arguing that closer attention to the math behind Bayesian statistical reasoning undermines the common assumption that rationality requires us to take individuals to be likely to possess pernicious traits on the basis of data about the prevalence of those traits within social groups to which they belong. Big picture, I’m interested in teasing apart the many and varied ways in which people can be praise- or blameworthy for their motivations, actions, and epistemic states, and I’m particularly interested in the sort of praise that people deserve for putting in effort toward trying to become morally better people. I’ll write a book about that someday.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
Definitely the Michigan High School Ethics Bowl. In between my M.Phil and my PhD I got a teaching degree and worked full-time as a secondary school teacher in South-East London for a couple years, and I loved it, so when I started the PhD I was very keen to find ways to keep talking philosophy with teenagers in schools that don’t have a ton of resources or extracurricular opportunities. I co-founded the Michigan Bowl with a handful of other grad students and an amazing local community organization called A2Ethics, and I co-organized it with A2Ethics and a rotating bunch of fellow grad students throughout the PhD. The Michigan Bowl is unusual in being the result of collaboration between philosophers and a community organization, and this has helped us to get a lot more local people involved; for instance, our “case studies” are all written by local people describing real moral issues that have arisen in their line of work, e.g. a case about the effects of climate change on an island in northern Michigan, and a case about a group of homeless people who set up a voluntary drug-and-alcohol-free community and then wanted to purchase some land just outside of Ann Arbor. Over the five years I was involved, we grew from working with five local schools to thirteen schools across the state, partnering with staff at other HE institutions to arrange coaching further afield. And we sent a bunch of students off to college — many of them first-gen — with intended majors or minors in philosophy. It’s been a ton of work, but it’s also been immensely rewarding.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
She’d be delighted. I’ve loved riddles and puzzles for as long as I can remember, so if someone told my childhood self that I was going to get paid to sit around trying to figure things out and talking to other people about the things I was trying to figure out, she’d definitely see that as a dream job.
What is your favorite sound in the world?
Wow, this is definitely the most random of the list of questions I was sent! Hmm, maybe the sound of my future self telling me that I’m going to get paid to sit around trying to figure things out and talking to other people about the things I’m trying to figure out?
What is your least favorite type of fruit and why?
OK, wait — this is the most random of the list of questions I was sent. Um. I guess I don’t really like melon very much; my heart sinks every time I get to the fruit salad and there’s only melon left. Melon is the cardboard in which the rest of the fruit salad is packed.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
