Email: crbousqu@syr.edu

CHRIS BOUSQUET

I am a PhD candidate in philosophy at Syracuse University, specializing in social and political philosophy and ethics. I hold a bachelors degree from Hamilton College.

My dissertation is on rights, and particularly the right to free expression. It examines 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 have interests in the philosophy of work, especially questions about the role work currently plays in our lives, its effects on other sources of value, and the role we should want it to play.

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

"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.

TEACHING

Courses taught as primary instructor (contact me for syllabi)

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

Courses Taught as Teaching Assistant

Social and Political Philosophy (for David Sobel), Spring 2022
Ethics and the Media Profession (for Jeremy Dickinson), Spring 2021, 2023
Social and Political Philosophy (for Luvell Anderson), Fall 2020
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