Email: crbousqu@syr.edu

CHRIS BOUSQUET

I am a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in philosophy at Syracuse University, specializing in social and political philosophy and ethics. I received my PhD in philosophy from Syracuse in 2024 and bachelors from Hamilton College in 2016.

I'm currently working on a number of papers related to rights, specifically the right to free expression. I'm interested in what grounds the right to free expression and what this can tell us about how to resolve hard cases like hate speech, campaign finance, and social media censorship.

I also work on the ethics and politics of work, especially topics related to emerging workplace technologies. I'm particularly interested in the role of work in our lives and its effects on other sources of value, as well how technology like AI and automation will affect our relation to work.

Before grad school, I worked as a research assistant and writer at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, where I focused on the ethics of data-driven policy. You can find some of the work I did there here.

RESEARCH

Home: Publications

PUBLICATIONS

Articles:

"Work and Social Alienation" (2023, Philosophical Studies). Penultimate version here.

I offer an account of social alienation, arguing that contemporary work habits corrupt workers' relation to their social lives, transforming sociality from an independent locus of value into a mere footnote to work. Resolving social alienation, I suggest, requires rethinking the amount of time we commit to work, the rigidity of the work schedule, and most crucially, the value that we attribute to work as the primary source of purpose in our lives.

“Words that Harm: Defending the Dignity Approach to Hate Speech Regulation” (2022, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence)

I defend the dignity approach to racist hate speech regulation, which maintains that hate speech impugns targets’ dignity and poses a threat to their equal treatment, against the challenge that hate speech lacks the power erode its targets’ dignity. Relying on findings in speech act theory, I argue that hate speech can erode its targets’ dignity 1) by constituting an act of discrimination, and 2) by enacting norms that call for treating targeted groups as inferior.

Reviews:

"Rights and Their Limits: In Theory, Cases, and Pandemics, written by F.M. Kamm" (2024, Journal of Moral Philosophy)

TEACHING

Courses taught as primary instructor (contact me for syllabi)

Social and Political Philosophy, Syracuse University, Fall 2021, 2023, Spring 2025
The Social Contract and Its Critics, Syracuse University, Spring 2025
Philosophy of Law, Hamilton College, Spring 2023; Syracuse University, Fall 2024
Philosophy of Feminism, Syracuse University, Spring 2024
Critical Reasoning, Hamilton College, Spring 2022
Telling Right from Wrong, Hamilton College, Fall 2021

Courses Taught as Teaching Assistant

Ethics and the Media Profession (for Jeremy Dickinson and Chip Osborne), Spring 2021, 2023
Social and Political Philosophy (for Luvell Anderson and David Sobel), Fall 2020, Spring 2022
Political Theory (for Dennis Rasmussen), Spring 2020
Human Nature (for David Bzdak), Fall 2019
Logic (for Mark Heller), Spring 2019
Theories of Knowledge and Reality (for Robert Van Gulick), Fall 2018

Teaching