Zoë Johnson King is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She previously worked at the University of Southern California and New York University and studied at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Cambridge. She specializes in moral psychology, metaethics, ethics, epistemology, and their interactions, with a particular focus on what it means to try to be a good person despite living in a disappointing, confusing, and profoundly unjust world. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, she discusses her book on praiseworthiness, explaining why philosophical attention has focused too narrowly on blame, how traditions from Hume to Kant shape her account of moral agency, and why the ethics of praise matters deeply for everyday life.
What is your work about? Why did you feel the need to write this work?
My book, as the title suggests, is about praiseworthiness. There is an enormous literature in philosophy—and in cognate fields, like law and psychology—that is ostensibly about moral agency and moral responsibility in general, but that, in practice, focuses overwhelmingly on blame, blameworthiness, punishment, excuses, exemptions, the standing to blame, and so forth, with only a comparatively tiny amount said about praise, praiseworthiness, and reward. I think that this is a shame. As I’ve argued elsewhere, praise can serve the same communicative social functions that blame serves: we affirm and convey our moral commitments equally well by acknowledging those who meet them as by admonishing those who fall short, and we highlight the respect and consideration that people deserve just as well by commending those who display it as by reprimanding those who lack it. Moreover, a world in which we never recognized others’ gestures of goodwill toward us but simply lay in wait, ready to pounce on them when they put a foot wrong, would be a sad and unpleasant world.
In fact, reams of literature in educational and developmental psychology suggest that praise is more effective than blame at keeping students on-task and promoting prosocial behavior. But philosophers don’t typically engage with this empirical literature; I only know about it because I previously worked as a secondary school teacher and was trained in the gentle art of “positive behavior management”, as it was called in that context. As extensive as it is, though, this empirical literature lacks a robust theoretical backing. There’s plenty of data on the efficacy of praise as a tool for influencing people, but little discussion of the concept of praiseworthiness. And yet praise isn’t very motivating or informative—so its benefits are lost—when it is distributed with no regard for merit. What was missing from the world, I thought, was an attempt at a comprehensive list of the types of thing for which people can be praiseworthy and the substantive conditions under which we are in fact praiseworthy for things of each type; in other words, what was missing was a systematic investigation into praiseworthiness in its own right, rather than merely as an afterthought in or a companion to a theory of blameworthiness. I wrote my book to fill this gap.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
This is actually a great question for me, because the book is framed as a quality-of-will view of praiseworthiness that unites Humean and Kantian traditions of moral-psychological thought about the nature of the will. As I see it, the quality-of-will view of praiseworthiness is the view that what we’re fundamentally praiseworthy for—i.e., what makes us good people, to the extent that we are, and what other stuff must relate to in order for us to be praiseworthy for it—is good will. But to say that isn’t to say very much unless you also say what the will is and what it is for it to be good. Here’s where the two big traditions come in. Humean approaches locate the agent’s will in her desires, tracing all the interesting parts of human cognitive, conative, and affective states to the influence of desire, whereas Kantian approaches tend to hold desires in disdain and to see them as merely the raw material from which the reflective choice that is the real work of the will begins. I think both traditions have a lot going for them, but their opposition is exaggerated and a bit silly. So, my view is a dualist quality-of-will view, according to which we’re fundamentally praiseworthy both for what we care about and for what we try to do about it. My account of praiseworthy caring is offered with a nod to the Humeans, and my account of praiseworthy trying is offered with a nod to the Kantians. I then develop an account of what I call “supplemental” praiseworthiness—that is to say, of the “extra credit” that we can earn when we deliberately do or bring about good things through praiseworthy goal-directed activity that puts a praiseworthy caring profile into practice—of which my view about moral worth is a special case.
How is your work relevant to the everyday life?
This is another great question! First and foremost, it’s relevant because most of us would say that we want to be good people and to act well, although we might not be completely certain what either of those things amounts to. The book is about how to evaluate this kind of well-meaning, but flawed (and perhaps somewhat hapless) agent; my view is called “The Partial Credit Approach” because it’s designed to capture the insight that you don’t have to be perfect to be praiseworthy. One of the later chapters also includes a discussion of how to deliberately increase your own praiseworthiness by working on yourself—a topic that I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about lately, especially in mental-health-focused spaces and activist spaces—and of the worrying respects in which background social, economic, and cultural injustices can facilitate or hinder people’s praiseworthiness. Lastly, the final chapter centers on a real-life case study about the backlash against praise for essential workers in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I find this an extraordinarily fruitful example because it’s essentially a collective, public exercise in the ethics of praise that is still in living memory. I was living in New York City at the start of the pandemic, and I was creeped out by the performative applause for essential workers at a time when my friends who actually were essential workers were losing their minds and weeping uncontrollably in our Zoom calls. And I was then gratified when I started to see a lot of opinion pieces and interviews with other essential workers who were criticizing the public praise that they were receiving, sometimes articulately and sometimes with brutal frankness. A lot of this material ended up in the book. I think that essential workers are far from the first group to have experienced praise that is, at times, insincere, unfitting, distracting, and manipulative, but they have done a lot to call our attention to these aspects of the phenomenon, and ethicists of praise would be wise to listen up.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
My dissertation was on moral motivation, which is an interesting topic because the literature interweaves metaethical concerns about moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, and moral metasemantics with first-order ethical intuitions about what makes somebody a good person. After a little while, I realized that I was much less interested in what kind of mental state a moral judgment is and much more interested in which motivations render somebody praiseworthy in their own right and which render them eligible for credit for the good actions that they may perform and/or the good states of affairs that they may bring about. Conveniently for me, around that time, there was a big upswing of philosophical interest in the quasi-Kantian notion of moral worth—roughly, the property a morally right act has when the agent is praiseworthy for performing it—so I rode that wave for a while. I also had what I initially misidentified as unrelated side-interests in the nature of epistemic justification, in legal standards of proof, and in what’s wrong with drawing pernicious predictive inferences about people on the basis of statistical demographic information, but after writing a couple papers on each of those topics I slowly realized that I was interested in them because I was interested in what kinds of attitudes and which approaches to evidence-gathering and reasoning render someone epistemically creditworthy, as well as which of them render someone morally praiseworthy for their epistemic behavior. It took me a little while to tie up the threads. Essentially, I backed into a research project by magpie-ing my way through a lot of different topics that looked shiny to me and very gradually noticing the themes among them!
What writing tips do you have?
SO many. I’m a huge advocate of daily writing—it doesn’t always happen in the middle of the semester, but I generally like to make sure I do at least 30-60 minutes each day on something that moves one of my writing projects forward. That could be drafting, editing, reading, writing up notes, jotting down ideas, or whatever. The important thing is to do a little bit of something each day, just to keep the project at the forefront of your mind and to ensure that there’s a process occurring for you to trust. I’ve published twenty-four articles and one book over the past seven years, so the proof is in the pudding, really. I also think that mental health and mindset are paramount, and I’m a big fan of whatever goofy tricks someone needs to do or whatever little games they need to play with their own agency to keep going. In grad school, I collected inspiring fortune cookie messages and labels from my Yogi tea bags and pinned them to the wall of my office cubicle. A friend gave me a book entitled Relentless Forward Progress, and I never read it—I think it was about ultrarunning, which I don’t do—but I displayed its title prominently as an attempt to strengthen my resolve. Another friend told me the cute quote, “you’ve got to sit down in the chair everyday so that the muse knows where to find you,” which I loved and recited to myself in the mornings when going to the chair to sit down. And a mentor gave me the incredible advice to battle impostor syndrome by telling myself, “I’m a good fraud—I can get away with this,” which I wrote down and kept in a drawer to look at as needed. I have a playlist of songs that reliably evoke various moods, to dip into as needed. I make a lot of lists for the joy of crossing things off. I have a folder in my inbox for emails with compliments in. I save a lot of memes. Just give your weird little self whatever she happens to need.
Zoë Johnson King
Zoë Johnson King is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She previously worked at the University of Southern California and New York University and studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of Cambridge. She specializes in moral psychology, metaethics, ethics, epistemology, and their interactions, with a particular focus on what it means to try to be a good person despite living in a disappointing, confusing, and profoundly unjust world. She grew up in Nottingham, in the U.K., and it would be prudentially unwise to disparage the Midlands within her earshot. Outside of academia, Zoë likes to run moderate distances, cook elaborate meals, escape from locked rooms, solve murder mysteries, and lift people’s spirits.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
