Vida Yao is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. She received her Ph.D. at UNC Chapel Hill in 2016 and did her undergraduate work at the University of British Columbia and UC Berkeley, as a Killam-Fulbright Fellow. She works in ethics and moral psychology, has written on boredom, weakness of will, the guise of the good thesis, and implicit bias, and organizes the Rice Workshop in Humanistic Ethics. She regularly teaches classes on the history of ethics, death, and feminist philosophy, and is pictured above with four of her former students. You can follow her on Instagram @vida.philosophy.
What excites you about philosophy?
Philosophy is exciting as a purely intellectual challenge – that is probably the most straightforward answer. But we forget that it hasn’t always been the case that we imagined the intellect to be something cold and unfeeling. When I am really “excited” about philosophy, it can often feel like being in love – it is hard to think of anything else, I obsess about the details, I have difficulty feeding myself or managing the mundane. I can’t keep my mouth shut.
Another aspect of philosophy that I find rewarding is that a lot of it involves an extended exercise of empathetic imagination: when piecing together a view, one is trying to get a sense of how someone else is organizing and understanding the world and trying to see what is compelling about that. One gains a particular kind of awareness of not just how best to understand the world at a philosophical level, one can also gain the details of another human being’s attempt to understand it, and then another, and then another. It is astounding to think of these people as other human beings, who existed, who viewed the world in these ways, and whose personalities end up seeping into their work even should they have tried very hard to prevent that. Given my basic assumption that human beings are largely mysterious and extremely difficult to understand (put aside cultural and historical differences), any comprehensible vision at all can sometimes take my breath away.
This can be especially rewarding when the attempt at understanding is with or of a living philosopher whom one also likes! It can be sublime to get to know someone as both a philosopher and as a person, through conversing with them and thinking through their views; the best conversations are often shot through with philosophy.
What are you working on right now?
I am currently defending a secular conception of grace, or gracious love. I propose that we understand grace as a love for human nature, where that is a love for a rich set of qualities and dispositions – perhaps centrally, our emotional and motivational dispositions – uncorrected or uncontained by virtue, and perhaps even when hardened into vice. Grace is in this respect, “unmerited” by the qualities of its objects. Alongside attitudes like hope and faith, grace (or its secular analogue) is important for secular conceptions of morality. But I argue that (at least how I’m conceiving it), grace can be felt toward a person even in cases where the kind of epistemic partiality needed to have faith in him cannot be sustained, or when the attitudes of faith or hope cannot be sustained without some other significant cost. In one paper, I argue that the cost can be interpersonal alienation: that at least in some contexts (in particular, those in which the beloved is ashamed of himself), a person needs a kind of love that involves both an awareness of and affection for his flaws and vices. Presumably love could overcome this alienation or estrangement, but I argue that contemporary views of love, in leaving little room for grace, fail to do so.
In ongoing work, I am trying to show how grace could quell forms of misanthropy and moral despair, both of which pose interesting challenges to moral motivation (and perhaps secular moral philosophy in general), to certain ideals of how we’d like to relate to one another as strangers, and to living meaningful lives. I plan to round this all off with a paper on graciousness as a self-regarding virtue. In the background of this project, I have been thinking more and more about different aspects of our psychologies that need to be properly discussed in moral psychology, but which are exceedingly difficult for me to think about in a clear way. For example, different forms of memory, the role of narrative, and how these aspects of our reflective inner lives are integral to changing our characters, for better or worse.
What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?
I don’t know that anyone should necessarily write about this, but a good question for some of us to think about more: what exactly makes a philosophical view deep or shallow?
What is your favorite sound in the world?
It’s hard to imagine having “one favorite sound”, but a sound that, it turns out, I cannot get out of my system is literally any note of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack to Twin Peaks. This is largely because I cannot get Twin Peaks out of my system. My parents (who, I should note, are good, sensible parents!) owned a laserdisc of the movie cut of the first season of Twin Peaks when I was very small. This is not because they are aesthetes or film buffs, but because they had heard that it featured Joan Chen, a mainland Chinese actress who had also grown up during the Communist Revolution, was plucked out of her rifle-training obscurity by Madame Mao, and who plays Josie Packard.
My parents also had, in general, very little sense of what would be appropriate or inappropriate for a child growing up in North America to watch. (And, in fairness to them, recall that Twin Peaks premiered in the US on ABC – what could be more wholesome than the “American Broadcasting Company”?) So, for a while, when I was about five or six, this movie cut was constantly on – my parents trying to figure out, from impossible material, who on earth killed Laura Palmer. It was not until I was an adult and I re-watched the series that I realized that it had given me scattered and rich but false memories of the past. And it’s not been until very recently that I’ve realized how much the soundtrack and the series formed my sensibility, and even my entire understanding of the place where I grew up (in the Douglas firs of British Columbia). Yes, Vancouver is extremely pretty – as visitors to the recent Pacific APA can attest. But, out of respect to that city, let’s not forget its unseemly past, and its unseemly and somewhat desperate present.
I think Twin Peaks even partly explains my fascination with moral psychology (and my fascination with America – but that’s a different story). What are these strange animals who can love so deeply and act so monstrously? How is it possible that they can know something, down in their bones, and yet be completely unable to recollect what it is that they know? But again, it wouldn’t be right to call the soundtrack, or the series, a “favorite” of mine. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I can’t pop it on or curl up with it. I’m feeling very Emily Brontë about the whole thing at the moment (that is, melodramatic) – I love it not as a pleasure, “any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
For anyone who finds this an even mildly intelligible thing to say in response to a question about one’s favorite sound, you might enjoy this video.
Which books have changed your life? In what ways?
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy changed my life completely. I can’t say in what ways yet, as if I ever could, since I will always go back and find little enigmatic bits to chew on. Autobiographically, I had thought at the time that I wanted to work in philosophy of mind, but was feeling stifled and disappointed by the kinds of questions that were being focused on. Williams opened a door for me. And it so happened that I read that book, along with a whole semester’s worth of Williams, with the philosopher who would then turn out to be my advisor – to whom I can’t express enough gratitude. I am still interested in philosophy of mind, but it’s all filtered through my interest in ethics and moral psychology. And within that book, too, I think I found the promise of a community of philosophers with whom I feel as though I can be myself, which, during my undergraduate and early graduate years, I never once thought was possible.
What’s your personal philosophy?
My personal philosophy is my public philosophy. It’s the only way I know.
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.
