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I'm an Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University. Before I was an Emergent Ventures Fellow (post-doc) at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and taught philosophy at Georgetown University, Towson University, and the University of Maryland.
My research focuses broadly on ethics, epistemology, and political economy, with additional interests in philosophy of religion, philosophy of law, and metaphysics—particularly the philosophy of time. My published work appears in journals including Philosophical Psychology, Episteme, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, The Independent Review and popular outlets such as Think, Philosophy Now, Free Inquiry, The Montreal Review, Presser Magazine, and many others too.
I have a book under contract with Peter Lang Publishers titled Better Not to Know: Why Knowing Less is Sometimes Best, which explores the surprising benefits of ignorance across various facets of life. Drawing from philosophy, economics, and moral psychology, this work uniquely applies economic concepts such as marginal thinking, incentives, and signaling theory to classic epistemological questions about the nature and value of knowledge. So far, the research for the (forthcoming) book has resulted in several papers:
'Better not to know: on the possibility of culpable ignorance' (Social Epistemology, 2025) argues that for certain individuals with psychological ticks, it is better for them to know less about the politics of others since, knowing about someone's politics will make them a worse epistemic agent overall due to the combination of their psychological tick and the triggering knowledge. So, at least in some cases, it is better if some people are ignorant of certain facts that, had they known them, would make them worse epistemic agents.
'The invisible hand of political irrationality' (Ethics, Politics, and Society, 2024) argues that virtue signaling and rationalizations in politics have a largely ignored upside: because people hate hypocrisy, and punish hypocrites by discounting their reputations, politicians and other political actors who virtue signal and rationalize to get ahead face charges of hypocrisy if they too often or too obviously change their views, especially when done in an unprincipled and self-interested manner. And, like the invisible hand of the market, pressure to be consistent and the motive to virtue signal and rationalize are a recipe for producing, in some cases, better behavior in the political domains, despite the many downside of such practices.
'Transparency and morally and politically corrupting' (Asian Journal of Philosophy, 2024) argues using tools from economics and moral psychology that transparency incentivizes people--due to their interest in their reputation and social status--to generate fake, but plausible-sounding reasons to justify their actions to others, and to refuse to compromise, thus forcing people to either maintain two separate identities, or to become the fake personal internally that they project publicly.
'Some moral benefits of ignorance' (Philosophical Psychology, 2023) argues that because people are social, coalitional creatures who must rely on each other to survive, we are partly motivated to look good to others. And doing good deeds, while remaining ignorant of the personal benefits and costs of acting good, can boost one's reputation for benevolence and trustworthiness, under the right conditions. And so, given those conditions, there is a strong incentive to do good while remaining ignorant of the personal costs and benefits of doing that good. There are, in other words, indirect moral benefits to (some kinds of) ignorance.
'The epistemology of moral praise and moral criticism' (Episteme, 2023) argues that using incentives (personal costs and benefits), we can argue that in WEIRD societies—Western, Educated, Individualized, Rich, and Democratic—moral criticism tends to be costlier, and so is more likely to be sincere, than moral praise. So, there is some reason, to take moral criticism as more sincere than moral praise, all else being equal.
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. My dissertation, Some Epistemological and Practical Challenges to Moral Realism: Evolutionary Debunking, Overgeneralization, and Afterward, was supervised by Peter Carruthers, with committee members Dan Moller, Christopher W. Morris, Brian Kogelmann, and Tomas Bogardus (Pepperdine University). I hold a Master's in philosophy from San Francisco State University and a Bachelor's in philosophy from the University of California, Davis.
Born and raised in Sacramento, California, I've been intrigued by philosophical questions—like the nature of infinity and moral disagreement—since childhood. A spontaneous decision to enroll in an introductory philosophy class as an undergraduate immediately clarified my life's direction as clear as day: I wanted to be a philosopher.
Beyond academic philosophy, I'm actively engaged in public philosophy through my writing on Substack, Uncommon Wisdom, where I strive to translate complex philosophical ideas into accessible conversations for broader audiences on topics like doggy ethics, the moral unseen, why democracy is bullshit, and transparency is corrupting, how signaling theory illuminates, whether Christmas gifts are wasteful, and many more. My interests outside academia include film (especially classics from the 1980s and 1990s), stand-up comedy, mixed martial arts (as both a practitioner and theorist of its ethical and epistemic dimensions), and engaging discussions about artificial intelligence's implications for education, ethics, and society.
I currently live with my wife Josie—a prosecutor—and our soon-to-be-adopted children in Apache Junction, where we embrace life in the desert. When not philosophizing or writing, I enjoy family life, watching old movies, making dad jokes, and cooking.
My complete C.V. is here. My personal email is jimmylicon01 [at]gmail.com. My work is below:
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
—Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is contradict other philosophers.
—William James, Remarks at a Peace Banquet
Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you’re not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you can’t, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you’re not extraordinary, much of what you do in philosophy will . . . [probably] be both unoriginal and wrong. That is why most of the philosophy of the past is not worth studying. So isn’t there something absurd about paying thousands of people to think about these fundamental questions?
—Thomas Nagel, Other Minds
—Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is contradict other philosophers.
—William James, Remarks at a Peace Banquet
Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you’re not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you can’t, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you’re not extraordinary, much of what you do in philosophy will . . . [probably] be both unoriginal and wrong. That is why most of the philosophy of the past is not worth studying. So isn’t there something absurd about paying thousands of people to think about these fundamental questions?
—Thomas Nagel, Other Minds
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