Research summary

I work on topics in analytic feminism and social metaphysics. My current research focuses on the nature of oppression, topics in the metaphysics and ethics of sexuality, and methodologies in feminist philosophy.  [see works in progress below].​
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My dissertation, How to Be Social, was a collection of three papers on the metaphysics of social construction. 

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Publications

​ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY
SEARCHING FOR SOCIAL PROPERTIES (2023) PHILOSOPHY & PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
​What does it take for a property to be a social property? This question is different from questions about what it takes for a property to be socially constructed. That is: it is one thing to be social, it is another to be socially constructed. Compared to questions about social construction, this question about sociality has received relatively little attention in social metaphysics. Here, I work from a very specific set of observations which arise from the social metaphysics literature to uncover a sufficient condition on sociality for properties, a condition which I argue all non-social properties fail to satisfy. Paper here.

PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY
WHY WE SHOULDN'T COMPARE TRANSRACIAL TO TRANSGENDER IDENTITY [WITH ROBIN DEMBROFF] (Nov. 2020) BOSTON REVIEW. Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice. Article here.

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Works in Progress

Please email me at dpayton[at]virginia[dot]edu if you'd like to read drafts of the papers below.

System Caging

Systemic marginalization is an extremely dangerous form of oppression. In this paper, I give an account of one particular type of systemic marginalization, something I call system caging. Generally speaking, an individual is system caged when, due to a confluence of barriers, they are unable to participate in social systems to obtain necessary goods and services, and this leaves them without recourse. My account is strongly informed by four cases, each of which involves at least one of four general forms of system caging. I present the cases; I then outline the fundamental elements of my account of system caging, clarify the underlying metaphysics, and then analyze the cases in terms of the proposed account. ​

Social Properties (in Preparation for The Routledge Handbook of Properties)

​Some properties, like the property of being money, seem obviously social. Others, like the property of being negatively charged, seem not to be. But what makes for the difference here, between which properties are social and which aren’t? This chapter provides an overview of four general ways that this question has been answered in the existing literature on social properties. ​

Normative Metaphysics

Many projects feminist metaphysics have powerful normative underpinnings, as evidenced by the fact that the central ontological posits of these projects somehow proceed from their underlying normative commitments. In other words: these projects in feminist metaphysics appear to background something like a principle of “ought implies is.” Here, I’m interested to know how that principle is best interpreted within the context of these projects and what can be said in its defense. To this end, I explore three interpretations of the principle: (i) that normative commitments generate epistemic constraints on theories in feminist metaphysics; (ii) that gender terms like ‘woman’ turn out to be normative, in much the same way as terms like ‘good’ and ‘just’; and (iii) that the normative commitments of these projects somehow directly deliver their ontological posits. I call these the epistemic interpretation, the metaethical interpretation, and the ontological interpretation of the “ought implies is” principle, respectively. Then in closing, I turn briefly to a larger methodological question regarding the degree to which the theoretical aims of projects in feminist metaphysics align with those of projects in traditional analytic metaphysics.

Scenes as Games: Agency, Autonomy, and Value in BDSM

Much of the existing philosophical literature on BDSM focuses on questions about the ethics of BDSM. For example, philosophers have debated whether BDSM activities and relationships are morally permissible; whether these activities can be consensual; as well as how the power dynamics involved in much of BDSM might be evaluated in view of the similarities these activities seem to share with features of oppressive social systems. But there is an underlying question here regarding the nature BDSM, one which remains largely unaddressed by the literature. In this paper, I take that metaphysical question to be prior to the normative question: it will be important to have a clear view of what BDSM is before we go on to evaluate whether or not it might be good.  
 
Accordingly, this is a paper about the nature of BDSM and BDSM activities: what they are like, what makes them unique, and the ways in which these activities might be valuable. Here, I work from the philosophical literature on games to analyze structured erotic encounters (or “scenes”) in BDSM. In particular, I argue that BDSM scenes are games, and that understanding them in this way yields important insights into the roles of agency, autonomy, and value in BDSM. 

Gender and Personhood

In this paper, I argue that gender oppression is, at bottom, a form of policing personhood. According to dominant gender ideology, if someone fails to satisfy gender norms, then they also fail to satisfy necessary criteria for personhood. Personhood is a morally significant category, and so being categorized as a non-person can have devastating consequences. 
 
Of course, the general idea that gender oppression involves de-personification is not new. It has been defended by a number of scholars across a wide range of critical disciplines. This paper aims to contribute specifically to the metaphysics of gender, with the argument that part what it is to have a gender is to be a person. And it also aims to contribute to the metaphysics of intersectionality. For on this view, intersectional oppression does not involve obscure relations between identity categories; it is about how things like race, class, and disability can undermine someone’s personhood, in view of gender

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