about
Hi! I'm Nate. Here's a button that will produce my CV, if you're into that sort of thing (updated March 2024).
I am an Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia.
I work primarily in social and political philosophy and philosophy of law, focusing on the legitimacy of institutions and the nature of the practical authority that they claim over us. I have published papers in these and other areas in venues such as Philosophy & Public Affairs, The Journal of Political Philosophy, and Australasian Journal of Philosophy. On this site you will find more detail about me, my research, my teaching, and how to contact me.
Immediately previously to UVA, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Previously to that, I was a Research Fellow with the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies, an interdisciplinary research center in political theory and philosophy at Goethe Universität Frankfurt in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I was also a visiting postdoctoral research fellow with the Chair of International Political Theory at Goethe Universität for Sommersemester 2014 and during the 2014-15 academic year I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech. I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis (2014), an M.A. in Philosophy from Virginia Tech (2008), and a B.A. in Biochemistry from Spring Arbor University (2004). I've ended up a long way from biochemistry! Everything else you'll find here is about philosophy but if you're interested: for my senior thesis, I investigated the reported efficacy of chaulmoogra oil for treating leprosy by separating out various chemical components of the natural oil and testing their properties.
I'm originally from the USA, though not from any particular place. I was born in the northeast and have lived in New York City, the south, the midwest, China, Germany, and Canada. I've learned a lot from my migratory ways. We can't take the view from everywhere or the view from nowhere, but I hope that having had the view from many-wheres helps my understanding of norms, institutions, and values. It’s nice to be back in time zones where I can occasionally watch some baseball. Sometimes I attempt to write fiction as an outlet for the kind of explosive purple prose that is most often counterproductive in a philosophy article aiming for clarity and precision.
My research is focused on issues of political authority and legitimacy. I am curious about how political institutions concentrate and exercise power and what that means for those of us subject to those institutions (i.e. all of us). My main research program right now focuses on legitimacy, especially the fundamental questions of how legitimacy is a distinct kind of normative assessment, how legitimacy practices function, and therefore how to theorize legitimacy across a range of subjects, including but extending beyond the state’s political legitimacy. As you can see more about in my papers, I also have side projects in the nature of authority as a source of reasons, the negotiation of norms in conversation, and adjudicative procedures.
Research
PUBLISHED
(these are draft versions, please refer to official versions)
11. Constituent power-with, Philosophy & Public Affairs (forthcoming)
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published version coming soon!
Abstract: Constituent power is an idea with a long tradition in modern political thought but has been largely abandoned since the middle of the twentieth century. Here I offer a new account of constituent power that avoids problems of the classical account, including the paradox of constitutionalism, and clarifies how individuals contribute to creating their shared political order. I argue that constituent power should be understood as an individual power-with: the agential power to constitute a legal order with others. Our individual, banal acts of law-abidingness each partially effect the collective outcome. We generally exercise constituent power unconsciously and automatically, guiding our actions to succeed as defined by law and relying on the legal system to take up our contributions and effectively combine them with others.
10. Bare Statistical Evidence and the Right to Security, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2023), 291-314
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.26556/jesp.v24i2.1650
Abstract: Courts and jurors sometimes refuse to assign liability to defendants on the basis of statistics alone, despite their apparent reliability. I argue that this refusal is best understood as a recognition of defendants’ right to security. Understood as a robust good in Philip Pettit’s sense, security requires that someone risking harm to others’ protected interests adopt a disposition of concern that controls against wrongfully harming them. Since trials risk harm, the state must adopt such a disposition. Statistics leave open the possibility of innocence and so wrongful harm in a way that the state cannot ignore; if it does use such statistics, it makes defendants wrongfully insecure. This explanation of the problem of bare statistical evidence is especially apt because security grounds the right to a fair trial and judicial procedural rights more generally.
9. The Concept of Legitimacy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2022), 381-395
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (j0urnal link), doi: 10.1017/can.2022.35
Abstract: I argue that legitimacy discourses serve a gatekeeping function. They give practitioners telic standards for riding herd on social practices, ensuring that minimally acceptable versions of the practice are implemented. Such a function is a necessary part of implementing formalized social practices, especially including law. This gatekeeping account shows that political philosophers have misunderstood legitimacy; it is not secondary to justice and only necessary because we cannot agree about justice. Instead, it is a necessary feature of actual human social practices, which must be implemented via practitioners' discretion in changing contexts.
8. In Defense of Exclusionary Reasons, Philosophical Studies (2021), 235-253
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1007/s11098-020-01429-8
Abstract: Exclusionary defeat is Joseph Raz’s proposal for understanding the more complex, layered structure of practical reasoning. Exclusionary reasons are widely appealed to in legal theory and consistently arise in many other areas of philosophy. They have also been subject to a variety of challenges. I propose a new account of exclusionary reasons based on their justificatory role, rejecting Raz’s motivational account and especially contrasting exclusion with undercutting defeat. I explain the appeal and coherence of exclusionary reasons by appeal to commonsense value pluralism and the intermediate space of public policies, social roles, and organizations. We often want our choices to have a certain character or instantiate a certain value and in order to do so, that choice can only be based on a restricted set of reasons. Exclusion explains how pro tanto practical reasons can be disqualified from counting towards a choice of a particular kind without being outweighed or undercut.
7. Authority, Illocutionary Accommodation, and Social Accommodation, Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2020), 560-573
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1080/00048402.2019.1621913
Abstract: By appeal to the phenomenon of presupposition accommodation, Rae Langton and others have proposed that speakers can gain genuine authority over their audiences when they implicitly claim such authority and the audience accommodates them. I address this argument in two ways. First, I explain where and why we should expect authority within particular conventional practices to be able to be gained by accommodation, considering the balance of values and norms that authority claims implicate. Second, I argue that audiences will often have good reason to accommodate the speaker without recognizing a claim of authority over them. To explain how audiences can accomplish this, I propose the mechanism of social accommodation. In social accommodation, audiences exercise control over the context in order to bring speakers and their utterances into conformity with background social norms, including moral, legal, and religious norms. In this way audiences can impose their understanding of the prevailing valid norms onto speakers.
6. Legitimacy and Institutional Purpose, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2020), 292-310
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1080/13698230.2019.1565712
Abstract: An institution's purpose matters at a fundamental level for its legitimacy. We usually theorize purpose in combination with a specified bundle of features that describe a particular institution. While this is useful and necessary for coming to a final theory of legitimacy for that institution, it is often unclear what role any given feature plays on its own. In this article I theorize the role of institutional purpose on its own, clearing the way for a more general theory of legitimacy that is especially useful when applied to novel institutions. I consider three sets of issues. First, it matters whether the institution's purpose is impermissible, merely permissible, or morally mandatory (although precisely how it matters is more complex than it may appear). Second, sometimes it matters how close to achieving its purpose an institution gets and it matters whether we are considering a hypothetical justifying purpose or an extant purpose. Third, considering extant purpose raises a variety of its own problems which I suggest can only be solved by adopting a more minimalist conception of legitimacy of the sort I defend elsewhere.
5. Grounding Procedural Rights, Legal Theory 25 (2019), 3-25
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1017/S1352325218000186
Abstract: Contrary to the widely accepted consensus, Christopher Heath Wellman argues that there are no pre-institutional judicial procedural rights. Thus commonly affirmed rights like the right to a fair trial cannot be assumed in the literature on punishment and legal philosophy as they usually are. Wellman canvasses and rejects a variety of grounds proposed for such rights. I answer his skepticism by proposing two novel grounds for procedural rights. First, a general right against unreasonable risk of punishment grounds rights to an institutionalized system of punishment. Second, to complement and extend the first ground, I more controversially propose a right to provision of the robust good of security. People have a right to others' protecting for avoiding wrongfully harming them: when I take an action that is reasonably expected to threaten the protected interests of others, I must take appropriate care to avoid setting back those interests. Inflicting punishment on someone--intentionally harming them in response to a violation--is prima facie wrongful, so I can only count as taking appropriate care in punishing when I follow familiar procedures that reliably and redundantly test whether they are liable to such punishment, i.e. whether they have forfeited their right against punishment through a culpable act.
4. The Relational Conception of Practical Authority, Law and Philosophy 37 (2018), 549-575
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1007/s10982-017-9323-3
Abstract: Traditional approaches to authority focus on the problem of the subject sacrificing her autonomy by deferring to the will of another. Yet authority is ultimately a relationship, making demands upon both parties. In particular, a relational approach highlights 1) the vulnerability of the subject to the authority and 2)the authority's paired demand that the subject make herself vulnerable and the acceptance of responsibility for that demand and its consequences. I argue for an instrumentalist conception of authority according to which one party only has genuine authority over another when four conditions are met: the duty, precedence, acceptance, and trustworthiness conditions.
3. Uncivil Disobedience: Political Commitment and Violence, Res Publica (2018), 475-491
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1007/s11158-017-9367-0
Abstract: "Civil" disobedience is consistent with violence, in particular violence directed at property. It is inconsistent with violence directed at persons because such violence directly contradicts the core commitment of the disobedient. Namely, disobedients necessarily commit themselves to an understanding of the political according to which others are understood as co-participants in the common project of living together. Such a commitment means that disobedients must address others as reason-respecting beings and so cannot do violence to them. Violence against property, however, does not per se undermine the commitment to the political. Focusing on the commitment to the political is a helpful corrective to the mistaken Rawlsian focus on fidelity to law and allows political disobedience to be understood as a coherent contestatory practice in a wider variety of contexts.
2. Institutional Legitimacy, The Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2018), 84-102
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1111/jopp.12122
Abstract: There is an underlying general notion of legitimacy that applies to all institutions, political or otherwise. To see this we must get away from the statist focus on the right to rule and instead, following Allen Buchanan, focus on how legitimacy functions practically. Legitimacy identifies those institutions which have the right to function and need only correlate with a duty not to coercively interfere with that functioning or with institutional insiders' fulfillment of their institutional roles. This general idea can then be applied to any kind of institution, from the local bakery to the state to the European Union, depending on each institution's constitutive functioning and what demands it makes on individuals.
1. In Defense of Content-Independence, Legal Theory 23 (2017), 143-167
Available here: Preprint (pdf); Published (journal link), doi: 10.1017/S135232521700009X
Abstract: Discussions of political obligation and political authority have long focused on the idea that the commands of genuine authorities constitute content-independent reasons. Despite its centrality in these debates, the notion of content-independence is unclear and controversial, with some claiming that it is incoherent, useless, or increasingly irrelevant. I clarify content-independence by focusing on how reasons can depend on features of a source or container. I then solve the long-standing puzzle of whether laws constituting content-independent obligations is consistent with the fact that some laws must fail to bind due to their egregiously unjust content. Finally I defend my understanding of content-independence against challenges and show why it retains a place of special importance for questions about the law and political obligation.
edited special issues
(I co-edited these volumes and co-wrote the introduction)
Special Issue: Legitimacy Beyond the State, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy (2020), introduction 281-291
with Antoinette Scherz and Cord Schmelzle
Abstract: The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology further and show how the special issue’s individual contributions apply it to their cases. In the first section, we provide a sketch of our purpose-dependent theory of legitimacy beyond the state. We then highlight two features of the institutional context beyond the state that set it apart from the domestic case: problems of feasibility and the structure of international law.
Special Issue on Philip Pettit’s The Robust Demands of the Good, Moral Philosophy & Politics (2018), introduction 1-8
with Susanne Burri
Abstract: Is there anything that unites the diverse goods of love and friendship, of the virtues of character, and of respect? In The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect (RDG, Oxford University Press, 2015), Philip Pettit argues that the goods of attachment, virtue, and respect all share a common basic structure: they are all, in Pettit’s terminology, ‘robustly demanding’ (RDG, p. 2). Pettit puts forward a novel way of thinking about important goods that he plausibly suggests sit at the core of the good life for a human being. Along the way, he offers a partial defense of a non-orthodox consequentialism that incorporates elements of virtue ethics and Kantianism, as well as offering insights into moral psychology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. In this special issue, five philosophers grapple with the arguments and the implications of Pettit’s book, and Pettit engages with their contributions in a careful and extensive response. In this introduction, we outline the core idea of a ‘robustly demanding’ good, we explain how Pettit employs it, and we sketch the main arguments of the five contributing authors.
book reviews
Arthur Isak Applbaum. Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $39.95 (cloth).
Ethics (2021), 369-374, doi: 10.1086/711213
Noam Gur, Legal Directives and Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 256 pp, hb £50.00
Modern Law Review (2019), 1179-1183, doi: 10.1111/1468-2230.12471
Long form
Legitimacy Beyond the State: Normative and Conceptual Questions, (Routledge, 2021)
with Antoinette Scherz and Cord Schmelzle
Printing of the CRISPP Special Issue of the same name.
Dissertation (2014)
My dissertation was atrociously (in retrospect) entitled "Evidential Modern Political Authority." Under what conditions can a government justifiably punish citizens for disobeying its laws? Many philosophers today think that the government has the moral authority to impose laws only if the citizens actually consent. This amounts to philosophical anarchism because no extant government meets this condition. But we can provide conditions for justifiable punishment and the authority of governments without appealing to moral obligation. I focus on what people may be blamed for doing, and I argue that when the government has trustworthy expertise, it has the moral authority to issue laws that citizens may be justifiably punished for disobeying. This condition, unlike actual consent, can be met. My dissertation advisor was Christopher Heath Wellman.
I now think the theory of authority presented in my dissertation is incomplete at best. For my most recent understanding of authority, see my papers.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
I have works in progress along my major research pathways of legitimacy and authority, civil disobedience, procedural rights, and the interplay between language use and social norms. These works are at a variety of stages; some complete drafts are available on the other websites linked under my contact information such as philpapers. I’m always happy to chat about these topics and future work.
teaching
I have been teaching philosophy for more than a decade and enjoy teaching on a wide variety of topics, mostly in value theory broadly construed. My experience includes teaching at public and private universities, small graduate seminars and 300-person intros, and students from a variety of backgrounds, including English majors at a Chinese university for a year. During my final year of graduate school I received the university-wide Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence.
Below are descriptions of every class I’ve taught as the professor. Upon request, I also have a full teaching dossier available that includes my teaching statement, descriptions of classes I TA’d for, and evaluations from my VT courses.
Introduction to Moral and Political Philosophy, University of Virginia, Spring 2021, Fall 2019
A large intro course for undergraduates, with smaller discussion sections. I intersperse articles written for a professional audience with public philosophy, changing themes from week to week and taking a broad topical approach to a survey of important issues in the fields.
State Legitimacy, University of Virginia, Spring 2021
A graduate seminar covering one of the core topics of political philosophy. Though we consider the various substantive theories of what makes a state legitimate, we focus on the questions of how we use legitimacy assessments and what a good theory of legitimacy should do. Takes a generally historically ordered approach to readings.
Political Philosophy, University of Virginia, Fall 2o2o and regularly
A third-year course. The texts change regularly but there are three main features. First, I use mostly books rather than individual articles or shorter readings. This engages philosophical ideas in a different way than most students have been exposed to. I focus on contemporary thinkers (other courses in the university cover more historical “greatest hits”). Book authors have included John Rawls, Charles Mills, Elizabeth Anderson, John Dewey, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Astra Taylor, Iris Marion Young, Thomas Nagel, and Liam Murphy. Second, I try to cover three major themes broadly construed: the distribution and constitution of political power (e.g. through democracy), economic and distributive issues, and the nature of social groups and community. Third, this is a writing intensive course involving regular small assignments and multiple longer papers, including chances for revision.
Environmental Ethics, University of Virginia, Fall 2020
A second-year general course with a large lecture and smaller regular discussion sections. Focused on the role of philosophical approaches to environmental problems, including normative ethical theories but going beyond to questions of collective action problems, political epistemology, concept construction, and much else. Fully online.
Democracy, Misinformation, and Propaganda, University of Virginia, Spring 2020
A grad course that approached the questions of political speech and manipulation through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on books in political economy and media studies, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and political science. Chances for regular writing and feedback on the development of philosophical ideas emphasized.
History of Political Philosophy, McMaster University, Fall 2018
A second-year course for general education students. We complete a general historical survey of canonical figures in Western political philosophy, starting with Plato and Aristotle, focusing on social contract theory, and ending in the nineteenth century with Mill and Marx. While tracing historical conversations, we also look at their implications for our contemporary political debates. Two meetings per week are devoted to lecture, one per week to collaboratively mapping arguments with an online tool.
Philosophy of Constitutional Law, McMaster University, Fall 2018
An advanced course for undergraduates in their final year of the Justice, Political Philosophy, and Law program as well as graduate students. The first half of the semester is devoted to addressing some of the foundational issues in constitutionalism, including the authority of constitutions and theories of interpretation. In the second half, we read a newly published book in philosophy of constitutional law, giving many of the undergraduates their first opportunity to read a single-authored philosophy book in its entirety. This course is writing intensive, with regular reconstructions and at least two longer research papers, with the choice to revise and write up to five.
The Legitimacy of Supranational Institutions, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Sommersemester 2018
A graduate seminar investigating the normative legitimacy of supranational institutions in general. We look at some specific cases that have received attention by theorists, including the legitimacy of the United Nations, European Union, international courts, and international NGOs. We also consider the general question of what legitimacy beyond the state means and how it differs from state legitimacy in both concept and normative conditions.
Propaganda and Political Speech, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Wintersemester 2017
A graduate seminar concerning the nature of propaganda, including what propaganda is, the mechanisms by which it works, the threat it poses to democratic governance and legitimacy, and potential responses to that threat. Focused around Jason Stanley’s recent book How Propaganda Works.
Theories of Cosmopolitanism, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Wintersemester 2016
A graduate seminar on theories of political cosmopolitanism, understood as the position that justice demands some kind of supranational institutional structure, ranging from distributed coordinative institutions to a single world state. We began with statist challenges to the extension of justice beyond the state and read various theorists in order of the degree of complexity and authority of proposed supranational institutions.
Philosophy of Civil Disobedience, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Sommersemester 2017; Sommersemester 2016
A graduate seminar on various philosophical theories of civil disobedience, starting with historical sources including Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, moving through Rawls and the Anglophone debate of the 1960s and 70s, culminating in contemporary theorizing of Brownlee, Scheuerman, and others. In addition to broad theories, we considered particular contemporary problems like whether and how civil disobedience applies to the digital realm and to government whistleblowing.
Jurisprudence, Virginia Tech (PHIL 4334), Spring 2015; Fall 2014
An upper-divisional undergraduate course with few philosophy prerequisites. Students were mostly political science and pre-law majors. I designed this course in such a way as to engage non-philosophy majors by focusing on intuitively compelling yet fundamental issues in the philosophy of law, especially whether citizens have a duty to obey the law and the justification of punishment. This was a writing-intensive course so included regular writing assignments and several papers.
Ethical Theory, Virginia Tech (PHIL 3314), Spring 2015; Fall 2014
An upper-divisional undergraduate course, mostly non-majors, focused on detailed examination of the major ethical theories, after students have been introduced to moral issues in introductory courses. We investigated major strains of deontology, consequentialism, and virtue theory. In each case we considered the historical foundations of the theory, its contemporary expressions and variations, and discussed major strengths and weaknesses. Some passing discussions of issues in metaethics, applied ethics, and axiology.
Global Ethics, Virginia Tech (PHIL 2304), Spring 2015; Summer 2008 (online)
A survey of ethical issues surrounding international relations and the forces of cultural and economic globalization. We touched on problems in just war theory, international aid, global poverty, and climate change, among others. The 2015 course included many members of the Corps of Cadets and the class chose drone warfare as the open topic for the final few sessions. The 2008 course was entirely online and included weekly readings, pre-recorded lectures, and an active online discussion board.
Morality and Justice, Virginia Tech (PHIL 1304), Fall 2014
A large introductory course that fulfills an area requirement in the liberal arts, with an enrollment of three hundred, mostly in their first year and undecided on major. It met twice weekly in a large lecture hall and then once a week in smaller, twenty-five student discussion sections led by four graduate teaching assistants. After a brief overview of major ethical theories, the majority of the course focused on contemporary moral issues such as abortion and drug use and policy. The content of the course is flexible to account for topical issues, at least one of which was up to the determination of the students. This semester included discussions of universal healthcare and gun control. The two weekly lectures generally set up contrasting viewpoints, allowing the final, smaller meeting of the week to focus on peer discussion about the contested issue.
Business Ethics, Washington University in St. Louis (U22 234), Summer 2013
A small evening course for non-traditional students. Many of these students were business professionals, actively employed full-time in a variety of fields. Most were business majors and none were philosophy majors. This course touched on a wide variety of the most important issues in business ethics, ranging from the underlying morality of the market to workplace dynamics. The topics were sensitive to the students’ concerns as professionals and included some subjects of contemporary concern, including using the case of Edward Snowden as a frame for a discussion of the ethics of whistleblowing.
Present Moral Problems, Washington University in St. Louis (U22 231), Spring 2013; Summer 2011
An introduction to contemporary moral issues, which for the most part intentionally bypassed ethical theory. The class engaged conflicting viewpoints on moral issues that were of both societal and personal interest, including debates over the nature of marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and others. These classes were very small, five students or less. This allowed me a greater degree of personal engagement and discussion that often focused on moral choices that students had personally encountered.
CONTACT ME
If you have questions about me, my work, my teaching, or anything else, the best way to contact me is via email. My email address is npadams [shift-2] virginia.edu.
You can also find me elsewhere: