Michael Zhao

About Me

I'm an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Notre Dame.

I work mainly in ethics, though I have interests in ancient Chinese philosophy, social and political philosophy, and decision theory as well. Much of my work concerns the nature of the moral emotions, the normative significance of moral anti-realism, and meaning in life.

My favorite philosophers are Aristotle, Xunzi, Hume, Nietzsche, and Williams.

I received my PhD from NYU in 2018, and was an undergraduate in philosophy at Princeton.

Here is my CV. My e-mail is mike.zhao@nd.edu.

Publications

  1. "Meaning, Purpose, and Narrative"
    Noûs (forthcoming)
    Pre-Print, Abstract

    According to many philosophers, "the meaning of life" refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our lives in a particular way—in terms of a unified life narrative—can supply us with many of those benefits. We might lose little if there is no such thing as the meaning of life, since there is still something that can provide much of what is valuable about it.

  2. "Seeing Yourself in Another, Seeing Life in Your Life"
    In Time, Meaning, and Value, eds. Daniela Dover and Niko Kolodny (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
    Pre-Print, Abstract

    This paper attempts to articulate some less familiar reasons why traditions are valuable. It argues that participating in traditions can let us transcend ourselves and our lives.

  3. "How to Do Things with Sunk Costs"
    Noûs 58 (2024): 596–615
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    It is a commonplace in economics that we should disregard sunk costs. The sunk cost effect might be widespread, goes the conventional wisdom, but we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of it. In this paper, I argue against the orthodoxy by showing that a disposition to honor sunk costs is often beneficial. Drawing on discussions of related topics in dynamic choice theory, I show that, in a range of cases, being disposed to honor sunk costs allows an agent to mimic a resolute chooser, someone who adopts the best plan at the outset of a decision problem and sticks with it, even when resoluteness is unfeasible. I discuss several kinds of cases in which honoring sunk costs coincides with resolute choice.

  4. "Survivor Guilt" (with Jordan MacKenzie)
    Philosophical Studies 180 (2023): 2707–2726
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    We often feel survivor guilt when the very circumstances that harm others leave us unscathed. Although survivor guilt is both commonplace and intelligible, it raises a puzzle for the standard philosophical account of guilt, according to which people feel guilt only when they take themselves to be morally blameworthy. The standard account implies that survivor guilt is uniformly unfitting, as people are not blameworthy simply for having fared better than others. In this paper, we offer a rival account of guilt, the relational account of guilt, which makes sense of survivor guilt and other forms of guilt without self-blame while preserving the intelligibility of guilt about culpable wrongdoing. According to this account, guilt involves the feeling of being unable to justify ourselves to others, and we lack self-justification when we (however blamelessly) stand on the positive side of an undesirable asymmetry with them. When someone survives something that those around her do not, the disparity in outcome constitutes an asymmetry that is often undesirable, because it arises from luck or violates a requirement of solidarity. Thus, survivor guilt is often fitting.

  5. "Can Moral Anti-Realists Theorize?"
    The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (2024): 693–709
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    Call "radical moral theorizing" the project of developing a moral theory that not only tries to conform to our existing moral intuitions, but also manifests various theoretical virtues: consistency, simplicity, explanatory depth, and so on. Many moral philosophers assume that radical moral theorizing does not require any particular metaethical commitments. In this paper, I argue against this assumption. The most natural justification for radical moral theorizing presupposes moral realism, broadly construed; in contrast, there may be no justification for radical moral theorizing if moral anti-realism is true.

  6. "Ignore Risk; Maximize Expected Moral Value"
    Noûs 57 (2023): 144–161
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    Many philosophers assume that, when making moral decisions under uncertainty, we should choose the option that has the greatest expected moral value, regardless of how risky it is. But their arguments for maximizing expected moral value do not support it over rival, risk-averse approaches. In this paper, I present a novel argument for maximizing expected value: when we think about larger series of decisions that each decision is a part of, all but the most risk-averse agents would prefer that we consistently choose the option with the highest expected value. To the extent that what we choose on a given occasion should be guided by the entire series of choices we prefer, then on each occasion, we should choose the option with the highest expected moral value.

  7. "Guilt without Perceived Wrongdoing"
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 48 (2020): 285–314
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad.

  8. "Solidarity, Fate-Sharing, and Community"
    Philosophers' Imprint 19 (2019): 1–13
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    In this paper, I give a philosophical account of solidarity, answering three salient questions: what motivates acts of solidarity; what unifies different acts into tokens of a single type of act, one of solidarity; and what values acts of solidarity exhibit. The answer to all three, I argue, involves a certain way of relating to others: identifying with them on the basis of shared features, and identifying with the larger group that one and the others both belong to.

  9. "Meaning, Moral Realism, and the Importance of Morality"
    Philosophical Studies 177 (2020): 653–666
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    Many philosophers have suspected that the normative importance of morality depends on moral realism. In this paper, I vindicate a version of this suspicion: I argue that if teleological forms of moral realism, those that posit an objective purpose to human life, are true, then we gain a distinctive reason to do what morality requires. I argue for this by showing that if these forms of realism are true, then an attachment to morality can provide a life with meaning, which is a widespread human need. I also argue that rival meta-ethical views, like anti-realism or thinner forms of moral realism, cannot make morality meaning-conferring in this way.

  10. "Intervention and the Probabilities of Indicative Conditionals"
    The Journal of Philosophy 112 (2015): 477–503
    Pre-Print, Published Version, Abstract

    A few purported counterexamples to the Adams thesis have cropped up in the literature in the last few decades. I propose a theory that accounts for them, in a way that makes the connections between indicative conditionals and counterfactuals clearer.

In Progress/Under Review

People who I'm not

In naming me, my parents decided to conjoin one of the world's most common given names with one of the world's most common surnames. As a result, there are lots of people not identical to me who share my name, many of whom have a larger internet presence than I do. Here's a (non-comprehensive) list of people who I'm not: