Research

Overview

I work in many areas of philosophy, mostly in the analytic tradition. 

Recently, I've been working on two main overlapping projects: 

(1) I've been developing a pluralistic consequentialist perspective in ethics. I think that the best form of consequentialism should incorporate considerations from animal ethics as well as environmental ethics.

(2) Another central concern in my research is the relationship between groups and their members. On the one hand, I argue that in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, phenomena at the group level cannot be reduced to phenomena at the individual level. On the other hand, I argue that in some contexts, an individualist perspective is needed. (My work on that topic was once noted in the New York Times.)

I also have other ongoing research projects in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of disability, philosophy of language, AI ethics, and the philosophy of statistics. 

I wrote my dissertation on the topic of vagueness, but I haven't tried to publish any of it. The climate problem seems to me to be more pressing than the Sorites paradox, but I do hope to return to that someday. My account (a kind of eliminativist view) is so weird that I don't think anyone else is going to scoop me. 

For a full list of my publications with links, see my PhilPapers page or my google scholar page. For my full CV, click here.

Selected Publications

"How to Save Pascal (and Ourselves) from the Mugger," with Ali Hasan, Dialogue (2023)

"How Does Disability Affect Wellbeing? A Literature Review and Philosophical Analysis," Journal of the Philosophy of Disability (2023)

"Individual Climate Risks at the Bounds of Rationality," in Risk and Responsibility: Theory and Application, Adriana Placani and Stearns Broadhead, eds., Routledge, 2023

"Comment on Gignac and Zajenkowski, 'The Dunning-Kruger effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact: Valid approaches to testing the hypothesis with individual differences data'," Intelligence (97) 2023

"Epistemic Structure in Non-Summative Social Knowledge," with R. Wolfe Randall, Social Epistemology (2023)

"Consequentialism in Environmental Ethics" in Stephen Gardiner and Allen Thompson, eds., Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2016)

 “A 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' for Climate Change?" Public Affairs Quarterly, 28(1) 2014

Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics, book co-edited with Ramona Ilea and Leonard Kahn (Routledge, 2014)

"Knowledge Essentially Based Upon False Belief," Logos & Episteme, 4(1) 2013

“Object-Dependence,” Essays in Philosophy, 14(1) 2013

“The Unusual Logic of Hurka’s Recursive Account,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, March 2012

“Climate Change and Individual Responsibility,” The Monist, 94(3), 2011

“Safety and Epistemic Luck,” with Ram Neta, Synthese 158, 2007