Selected work
Political philosophy
"Agnosticism and Pluralism about Justice," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2023. (Available Open Access)
Abstract: Political liberalism cannot explain why reasonable citizens should support what they regard as just policy. Citizens may regard many policy options as reasonable, but only one as just. The dominant view among political liberals, which I call agnosticism, takes no stand on how citizens ought to rank these reasonable alternatives to determine which to support. Agnostics see all criteria for comparing reasonable policies as on a par, whether they be theories of justice or coin flips. I show how Quong’s (2011) analysis of reasonableness leads to agnosticism. I then develop the pluralist alternative, which holds that citizens should support the reasonable policy they regard as most just. What I call pluralism sees multiple conceptions of justice as correct, or “most reasonable.” Despite the view’s prima facie implausibility, I show that it is a compelling alternative to agnosticism that respects the fact of deep, reasonable disagreement about justice in liberal societies.
"Rights, Mini-Publics, and Judicial Review," Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2023. (Available Open Access)
Abstract: Landmark Supreme Court rulings determine American law by adjudicating among competing reasonable interpretations of basic political rights. Jeremy Waldron argues that this is democratically illegitimate, as what determines the content of basic rights is a bare majority vote of an unelected, democratically unaccountable, elitist body of nine judges. I argue that Waldron’s democratic critique of judicial review has implications for real-world reform, only not the implications he thinks it does. He argues that systems of legislative supremacy over the judiciary are democratically preferable to the American one. I provide reasons why his argument is unsound, and that, properly construed, Waldron’s premises support implementing a system where ordinary citizens chosen by lottery participate in a deliberative mini-public to vote on which reasonable interpretation of a basic political right will become the law of the land.
"Liberalism, Polarization, and the Aggregation Problem," Synthese, Forthcoming.
Abstract: Successful public justification of coercive policy in liberal societies relies on a solution to what I call the aggregation problem. Without a method of weighing and balancing shared reasons that are acceptable to all, no genuine consensus on the acceptability of a single principle or policy is possible. This is a serious problem for theories of liberalism that rely on public justification or public reason that has largely been ignored. I show the seriousness of this problem by using an example from contemporary politics, abortion policy. Within the context of abortion policy, I consider three approaches to the aggregation problem and argue that none of them offers a promising solution. This result, I argue, generalizes beyond abortion policy and poses a problem for the entire project of public reason liberalism. Even in an idealized society where all deliberate from a shared standpoint, it may not always be possible to find a policy all citizens regard as acceptable: not because there is a diversity of reasons, but because there is no uncontroversial method of weighing and aggregating reasons. This doesn’t mean public reason is useless, though. Instead of being a standard for justifying coercive policy, I argue public reason should be seen as a procedural tool for managing and mitigating the inescapable political conflicts that will inevitably arise in a pluralistic democratic society.
"Political Liberalism Without Epistemology" (Undergoing revision)
Abstract: Political liberals ask that citizens set aside many of their justified beliefs in contexts of political deliberation, reasoning only from the subset that counts as “shared” or “public”. For this practice of liberal restraint to be justified, citizens must be able to have motivating reasons to comply with it. Many theorists locate these motivating reasons in the demands of epistemic rationality. I argue that a recent form of this response, which draws on the epistemology of peer disagreement, is incompatible with treating citizens as free and equal, insofar as that response applies to all citizens as such. After presenting liberal restraint as an equilibrium solution to a two-stage game-theoretic coordination problem, I sketch an alternative theory, inspired by Rawls’ remarks on overlapping consensus, which holds that each citizen has his or her own shared or private motivating reasons to practice restraint. I show how on this alternative theory, political liberals should focus less on articulating the reasons citizens have qua citizen to practice restraint and more on why sectarian doctrines, including the major world religions, tend across generations to evolve in the direction of embracing restraint for their own reasons.
Business ethics
"Moral Diversity and Business Legitimacy," Journal of Business Ethics, Forthcoming.
Discussions of why corporations should cultivate a diverse workforce emphasize justice- and profit-based reasons. This paper defends a distinct third rationale of legitimacy-based reasons for diversity. I articulate and defend the market power account of firm legitimacy, which holds that private firms, much like governmental institutions, have a moral obligation to justify the power they exercise over stakeholder groups when those groups lack meaningful rights of exit from their relationship with the firm. Firms can discharge this obligation by incorporating moral diversity into managerial teams that decide company policy. Moral diversity confers both epistemic and moral advantages onto teams tasked with solving complex problems that impact disparate stakeholder groups. These advantages confer proceduralist legitimacy onto implemented policies, giving impacted groups reason to accept those policies, even when those groups find those policies objectionable on other grounds.
“Technology Firms and the Business Case for Diversity” in Gregory Robson and Jonathan Tsou (eds.), Technology Ethics: A Philosophical Introduction and Readings, Routledge Press, 2023.
Aesthetics and normative cognition
“Moral Learning, Rationality, and the Unreliability of Affect,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (2018): 460-473.
Abstract: James Woodward, John Allman, and Peter Railton argue that our moral intuitions are products of sophisticated rational learning systems. I investigate the implications that this discovery has for intuition-based philosophical methodologies. Instead of vindicating the conservative use of intuitions in philosophy, I argue that what I call the rational learning strategy fails to show philosophers are justified in appealing to their moral intuitions in philosophical arguments without giving reasons why those intuitions are trustworthy. Despite the fact that our intuitions are outputs of surprisingly sophisticated learning mechanisms, we do not have reason to unreflectively trust them when offering arguments in moral philosophy.
“Aesthetic Debunking and the Transcendental Argument of the Novel,” Aesthetic Investigations 4, no. 1 (2020): 36-53. (with Jonathan M. Weinberg) [Link]
Abstract: Gilbert Plumer has recently argued in his (2017) that psychologically rich novels offer the reader an opportunity to draw a transcendental inference: what seems to us believable about the psychology of the characters, can be inferred to be actually true about real human psychology. We propose, first, to disambiguate a key term of art in Plumer’s argument, “believable”. Given that disambiguation, the empirically contingent nature of one of Plumer’s premises comes into view. We raise two main lines of empirically-motivated debunking arguments against that premise, drawing particularly upon the psychological literatures about processing fluency, and the illusion of explanatory depth. We then conclude with some further implications for naturalistic approaches to aesthetics, and the relevance of such debunking arguments.
"Aesthetic Debunking Arguments" in Alex King and Christy Mag Uidhir (eds.), Art and Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2024. (with Jonathan M. Weinberg)
Abstract: Debunking arguments have received a great deal of attention in ethics, but the argument schema hasn’t been deployed in aesthetics. Using the process-debunking argument schema, we show that aesthetic debunking arguments can come in two varieties: cognitive and non-cognitive. Cognitive aesthetic debunking arguments show that some process by which we form beliefs about or on the basis of fictional worlds is unreliable, leading us to distrust those beliefs. Noncognitive aesthetic debunking arguments show that the pleasure we take in artworks results from some process we reject, either as aesthetically inappropriate, or as alien to our true selves, leading us to feel disquiet in what was once unmitigated aesthetic pleasure. We propose examples of each form of argument.
Reviews and public philosophy
Court Packing: Arguments for and Against," post for the Public ethics blog, published by the Stockholm centre for the ethics of war and peace. [Link}
I consider four arguments for and against expanding the size of the Supreme Court. I argue that considerations of perceived legitimacy give all citizens--regardless of their partisan inclinations--reasons to oppose court packing.
Review of Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 19, no. 1 (2022): 95-98.
Review of Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, Business Ethics Quarterly, 33, NO.1 (2023): 244-247.