BOOKS
(under contract) Better Not to Know: Why Knowing Less is Sometimes Best (Peter Lang Academic Publishing)
This book challenges the default assumption that more knowledge is always better, arguing instead that ignorance can sometimes be epistemically and morally valuable, especially at the margins. Drawing on the marginal theory of value, I show that the costs and benefits of knowing depend not just on the content but also on context — what we stand to gain or lose at the edge of our cognitive limits. Incentives and signaling theory reveal that in many social and political environments, knowing less can actually help us navigate reputational hazards, preserve trust, and maintain practical focus.
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
(forthcoming) Politics Vastly Increases the Moral Hazards of Artificial Intelligence: The Philosophy of AI: Applied Issues in the Philosophy of AI
Schwitzgebel (2023, 2023) argues that AI poses a moral dilemma: either we wrongly ignore its potential moral standing or we waste moral resources on entities that don’t deserve them. I argue that politics makes these hazards worse by rewarding group signaling over epistemic responsibility, pushing people to adopt irrational stances on AI rights or neglect. When the state steps in, these signaling dynamics scale up, increasing the risk of large-scale moral harms and wasted moral effort.
(forthcoming) Rowe Your (Own) Boat: Economic Productivity as Civic Virtue: Reason Papers
It is widely assumed that civic virtue belongs primarily to the domain of government, especially when those institutions aim to foster a free and prosperous society. Enter Mike Rowe, host of the TV show Dirty Jobs, who argues that hard work is a virtue worth celebrating. In this piece, I argue that Rowe is righter than he knows: economic productivity is a form of civic virtue when it adds to the peace and prosperity of a liberal society. Why? First, societies in which individuals are incentivized to unduly shift their burdens onto others are deeply at odds with both fairness and flourishing. Second, economic productivity offers a way for societies to buy their way out of morally bad social arrangements. It is expensive to guarantee rights and freedoms. When people are less economically productive, societies are more likely to become savage.
(forthcoming) If You Don't Know, Now You Know: MMA, Know-How, and Self-Defense: Fighting and Philosophy
People have the right to bodily self-defense. But they face an obstacle: the widespread presence of fake martial arts that not only waste time and money but risk serious injury and death—call this the know-how problem. Finding effective self-defense techniques in such an environment is a sorting challenge, especially for laypeople. In this chapter, I argue that mixed martial arts (MMA)—both professional and practiced—offer a rough epistemic guide to effective fighting techniques. Not only that, MMA belongs to what I call the epistemic economy of self-defense (EESD): an evolving, distributed system of knowledge related to bodily self-defense, analogous to distributed knowledge systems in economics. While ethical objections to MMA exist, I argue that they are weaker than they first appear, and that the ethical case for MMA—both as a practiced and professional sport—is stronger than often assumed.
(forthcoming) You Oughta Know: On the Possibility of Morally Mandatory Knowledge: Episteme
Some people act despite knowing their actions are wrong. Others know and do the right thing. This paper focuses on people who rightly believe that gaining specific knowledge would be enough to motivate moral action but remain strategically ignorant due to self-interest. This paper argues that such individuals have a moral obligation to acquire the salient knowledge given the following applies: first, such individuals are aware of the morally efficacious knowledge; and second, the efficacious knowledge is accessible to them. Then we examine similarities and differences between morally mandatory knowledge and culpable ignorance. Finally, morally mandatory knowledge shows that ignorance can result from deficient moral character.
(2025) ChatGPT is Bullshit (Partly) Because People are Bullshitters: Philosophy & Technology
In a recent article (‘ChatGPT is bullshit’), the authors argue that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT generate bullshit—a philosophical term coined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt that picks out convincing, but truth-insensitive content. The authors argue LLMs like ChatGPT are bullshitting machines. Here I defend a complementary account of why LLMs like ChatGPT produce bullshit: LLMs like ChatGPT are bullshit (partly) because people are bullshitters. Given that LLMs like ChatGPT predict and generate text based on large quantities of data from human language users, LLMs like ChatGPT would naturally reflect that fact—bullshit in, bullshit out. This paper then explores the incentives for people to bullshit—to manage reputations, to signal their intelligence, and to participate in the marketplace for bullshit—along with why such incentives will likely motivate people to use LLMs like ChatGPT to better bullshit each other.
(2024) Better Not to Know: On the Possibility of Culpable Knowledge: Social Epistemology
Many philosophers hold there are genuine cases of culpable ignorance. This paper argues that there are conditions that can render knowledge epistemically culpable too. First, we contrast culpable ignorance with morally culpable knowledge. Second, we examine the nature of epistemically culpable knowledge using a key example. We then highlight empirical support for the claim that there are real-world conditions that make epistemically culpable knowledge possible. Next, we survey three kinds of epistemic culpability fostered by culpable knowledge. Finally, we address the benefits objection and argue that it fails.
(2024) The Invisible Hand of Political Irrationality: Ethics, Politics, and Society
Why do we vote, protest, and boycott? Economists explain partisan actions, despite their costs, by arguing political irrationality by a single partisan isn’t costly to them as an individual—they can afford the political irrationality, despite the social costs. And some philosophers worry about the moral and epistemic costs of political irrationality. Here I argue that political irrationality has some benefits: it encourages partisans to engage in virtue signaling and rationalization in politics. And while virtue signaling and rationalization are often epistemically and morally bad, they can nonetheless confer benefits too, like facilitating societal and moral progress.
(2024) Democracy Incentivizes Bullshit: From Weak Incentives to Epistemic Crises: Social Philosophy Today
Democracies face an epistemic crisis: incentivizing bullshit. Here “bullshit”—coined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt—means convincing truth-insensitive statements or claims. This paper focuses on several democratic factors that incentivize bullshit: deliberative transparency, epistemic spillover effects, and rational irrationality. These factors pollute the epistemic commons, decrease institutional trust, and enact epistemic injustice. Unfortunately, it is difficult to separate democratic governance from incentivizing bullshit.
(2024) Transparency as Morally and Politically Corrupting: Asian Journal of Philosophy
It is widely held that transparency incentivizes good behavior. Though that may be, sometimes, there are tradeoffs here: transparency incentivizes people to conceal genuine reasons for action and instead manufacture insincere reasons for public consumption. The evidence for this comes from moral psychology and economics: when people are observed, they acquire an incentive to make more deontological and intuitive moral judgments than they would otherwise. In contrast, transparency incentivizes politicians and leaders to make more consequentialist and calculated moral judgments than they would otherwise. Transparency incentivizes people to foster distinct (inauthentic) moral identities—one personal and one public—or to make moral judgments based on reputational reasons that sometimes diverge from the moral facts. In either case, transparency can be morally and politically corrupting
(2024) Better Spent Elsewhere: Why Philosophy Should Be Funded Less: The Independent Review
Suppose you’ve got millions of dollars to donate. Don’t donate it to academic philosophy. That would be a waste. First, tens of thousands of philosophy books and articles are published yearly, too many to be read. Producing philosophical articles and books faces diminishing returns and diverts money and attention from more important causes. Second, many philosophy books and articles contradict each other; at best, only some can be correct. Third, philosophy classes are poor at instilling critical thinking skills. Fourth, academic philosophy looks like academic rent seeking: gaming the rules of the system to gain resources at the expense of producing value for students and society. We thus have solid reasons to fund philosophy less.
(2023) Should We Hope Apparent Atrocities Are Illusory? Exploring a Puzzle in Moral Axiology: dialectica
The world contains atrocities such as famine and war. Can we rationally hope they are morally illusory? Philosophers have recently focused on the question of the axiology of such claims, and how it relates to hope, e.g., can we rationally hope God exists if that improves the world? First, we have good reason to hope moral atrocities are merely apparent: our world would be morally better than if they weren’t real. However, some argue we know atrocities are real. Even bracketing off whether we have such moral knowledge, perhaps we shouldn’t hope atrocities are morally illusory because that state of affairs would undercut our moral reliability, entail we had false and epistemically unjustified moral beliefs, face moral opportunity costs, and perhaps even deny the dignity of victims of (even only apparent) atrocities.
(2023) That Seems Wrong: Pedagogically Defusing Moral Relativism and Moral Skepticism: International Journal of Ethics in Education
Students sometimes profess moral relativism or skepticism with retorts like ‘how can we know?’ or ‘it’s all relative!’ Here I defend a pedagogical method to defusing moral relativism and moral skepticism using phenomenal conservatism: if it seems to S that p, S has defeasible justification to believe that p—e.g., moral seemings, like perceptual ones, are defeasibly justified. The purpose of defusing moral skepticism and relativism is to prevent these metaethical views from blocking insightful ethical inquiry in the classroom. This approach gently shifts the burden of proof to the relativist or skeptic, and makes such views costlier: if we reject moral seemings as a kind, we must reject other less objectionable seemings too, e.g., intellectual seemings. And finally, this method improves learning outcomes by ‘hooking onto’ student familiarity with seemings, e.g. seeing is (defeasibly justified) believing.
(2023) Some Moral Benefits of Ignorance: Philosophical Psychology
When moral philosophers study ignorance, their efforts are almost solely confined to its exculpatory and blameworthy aspects. Unfortunately, though, this overlooks that certain kinds of propositional ignorance, namely of the personal costs and benefits of altruistic actions, can indirectly incentivize those actions. Humans require cooperation from others to survive, and that can be facilitated by a good reputation. One avenue to a good reputation is helping others, sticking to moral principles, and the like, without calculating the personal costs of doing so, e.g., saving someone from a burning building or sticking to moral principles, without calculating whether it would be too personally costly or sufficiently beneficial. These actions are indirect moral benefits (partly) resulting from that kind of propositional ignorance.
(2023) Why the Heck Would You Do Philosophy? A Practical Challenge to Philosophizing: Logos & Episteme
Philosophy plausibly aims at knowledge; it would thus be tempting to hold that much of the value of doing philosophy turns on securing knowledge. Enter the agnostic challenge: suppose that a philosophical agnostic (named ‘Betsy’) wants to discover only fundamental philosophical truths. However, the intractable disagreement among philosophical experts gives her pause. After reflecting on expert disagreement, she decides that doing philosophy, for her truth-seeking error-avoiding purposes, is irrational. In this paper, I argue that the agnostic challenge isn’t easily overcome. Although there are many reasons to do philosophy, the agnostic challenge implies there is less value to doing philosophy than many philosophers may have believed.
(2023) The Epistemology of Moral Praise and Moral Criticism: Episteme
Are strangers sincere in their moral praise and criticism? Here we apply signaling theory to argue ceteris paribus moral criticism is more likely sincere than praise; the former tends to be a higher-fidelity signal (in Western societies). To offer an example: emotions are often a self-validating as a signal because they’re hard to fake. This epistemic insight matters: moral praise and criticism influence moral reputations, and affect whether others will cooperate with us. Though much of this applies to generic praise and criticism too, moral philosophers should value sincere moral praise and moral criticism for several reasons: it (i) offers an insight into how others actually view us as moral agents; (ii) is feedback to help us improve our moral characters; and (iii) encourages some behaviors, and discourages others. And so as moral agents, we should care whether moral praise and moral criticism is sincere.
(2023) Moral Language: SAGE Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies
Briefly argues that different kinds of moral language -- deontological versus consequentialist -- signals different traits about the speaker, and that leaders can use that insight to pick and choose the moral language they use to be more effective as leaders; and that leaders can use virtue signaling to shape the norms within the institutions and organizations they lead to socially and morally improve them.
(2022) Why Disdain Replicated Art? Metaphysics and Art in ‘The Elephant in the Brain’: Philosophia
Why disdain (perfectly) replicated art? If art is valuable because it evokes experiences of beauty, they should be comparable. In chapter 11 of The Elephant in the Brain, Simler and Hanson (S&H) argue we actually care about the extrinsic properties of art—e.g. who made it—to signal our intelligence and taste. Here I defend a different explanation for the evidence cited by S&H: the extrinsic properties of art are central to what constitutes art, and play a bigger role fixing the value of art than S&H allow. Further, the potential for diminishing marginal utility on the value of the intrinsic properties of art—seeing the original Mona Lisa is rare; seeing a copy isn’t—explains why we assign such value to the extrinsic properties of art. And thus we have a non-signaling explanation of art consumption, which may or may not complement signaling theory.
(2021) Aspirational Theism and Gratuitous Suffering: Religious Studies
Philosophers have long wondered whether God exists; and yet, they have ignored the question of whether we should hope that He exists—call this stance aspirational theism. In this paper, I argue that we have a weighty pro tanto reason to adopt this stance: theism offers a metaphysical guarantee against gratuitous suffering (i.e. God would not permit gratuitous suffering). On the other hand, few atheist alternatives offer such a guarantee—and even then, there are reasons to worry that they are inferior to the theistic alternative. Given this difference, we have a strong pro tanto, but not all-things-considered, reason to adopt aspirational theism.
(2020) Skeptical Hypotheses and Moral Skepticism -- A Reply to May: Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy
May (2013) argues, pace philosophers like Sinnott-Armstrong (2006), that moral skepticism is less plausible than perceptual skepticism when formulated in terms of epistemic closure (call this the implausibility claim). In this paper, I argue that moral skepticism is no less plausible than perceptual skepticism when formulated in terms of epistemic closure, despite May’s objections: we need only combine the moral nihilist hypothesis with an evolutionary account that explains why would have comparable moral evidence, even if moral nihilism were true. Then I argue pace May that imaginative resistance doesn’t challenge the plausibility of an epistemic closure approach to moral skepticism: it is poor evidence that moral truths hold necessarily. So, we should be skeptical of the implausibility claim.
(2019) Modest Meta-Philosophical Skepticism: Ratio
Intractable disagreement among philosophers is ubiquitous. An implication of such disagreement is that many philosophers hold false philosophical beliefs (i.e. at most only one part to a dispute can be right). Suppose that we distribute philosophers along a spectrum arranged from philosophers with mostly true philosophical beliefs on one end (high-reliability), to those with mostly false philosophical beliefs on the other (low-reliability), and everyone else somewhere in-between (call this is the reliability spectrum). It is hard to see how philosophers could accurately locate themselves on the reliability spectrum; they are prima facie as well positioned as their peers with respect to philosophical matters (call this the placement problem). In this paper, I argue that the reliability spectrum and placement problem lend support to modest meta-philosophical skepticism: we have a pro tanto (but not an ¬all-things-considered) reason to withhold ascent to philosophical claims.
(2015) The Fine-Tuning Argument and the Problem of Poor Design: Philosophia
My purpose, in this paper, is to defend the claim that the fine-tuning argument suffers from the poor design worry. Simply put, the worry is this: if God created the universe, specifically with the purpose of bringing about moral agents, we would antecedently predict that the universe and the laws of nature, taken as a whole, would be well-equipped to do just that. However, in light of how rare a life-permitting universe is, compared to all the ways the universe might be have been life-prohibiting given the laws of physics, strongly suggests that the universe was poorly designed for that purpose. This casts doubt on the claim that God has much to do with designing the universe. First, I introduce the fine-tuning argument, and second, I explain and defend the poor design worry against objections that, while apparently compelling, I argue are misleading.
(2013) Dissecting the Suicide Machine Argument: Insights from the Hales-Licon Debate: Logos & Episteme
I assess the debate over the Suicide Machine Argument. There are several lessons to be learned from this debate. First, there is a fruitful distinction to be made, between tensed and tenseless versions of presentism, despite the temptation to suppose that presentism is a tensed theory of time. Second, once we’ve made the distinction between different kinds of presentism, it is clear that Licon’s objection protects the tenseless version of presentism from the Suicide Machine Argument; however, the argument is still effective against the tensed version. Finally, I argue that if the presentist wants to remain a card carrying presentist, in the face of the challenge posed by Hales, then she must abandon her commitment to tense.
(2013) Properly Functioning Brains and Personal Identity: An Argument for Neural Animalism: SATS
Surely, I am the same person I was several years prior. I must be identical to something that persists. First, I argue that the reductive materialism and Lockean view of personal identity are plausible accounts of our mental life and survival conditions. Second, although these positions appear to be in tension, I argue that a plausible way to reconcile them is a novel kind of animalism. This view says that I am identical to my properly functioning brain (or a part of that brain). Thus, I am identical to my properly functioning brain. Call this view neural animalism.
(2013) On Merely Modal Epistemic Peers -- Challenging the Equal-Weight View: Philosophia
There is a controversy, within social epistemology, over how to handle disagreement among epistemic peers. Call this the problem of peer disagreement. There is a solution, i.e. the equal-weight view, which says that disagreement among epistemic peers is a reason for each peer to lower the credence they place in their respective positions. However, this solution is susceptible to a serious challenge. Call it the merely modal peers challenge. Throughout parts of modal space, which resemble the actual world almost completely, there are hordes of epistemic peers, who disagree with almost any arbitrarily chosen belief had by residents of the actual world. Further, the mere modality of these peers is not itself an epistemic difference-maker. Thus, on the equal-weight view, we should significantly lower the credence we place in most of our beliefs. Surely, this is seriously mistaken. Thus, there are serious considerations that cut against the equal-weight view.
(2012) Sceptical Thoughts on Philosophical Expertise: Logos & Episteme
My topic is two-fold: a reductive account of expertise as an epistemic phenomenon, and applying the reductive account to the question of whether or not philosophers enjoy expertise. I conclude, on the basis of the reductive account, that even though philosophers enjoy something akin to second-order expertise (i.e. they are often experts on the positions of other philosophers, current trends in the philosophical literature, the history of philosophy, conceptual analysis and so on), they nevertheless lack first-order philosophical expertise (i.e. expertise on philosophical positions themselves such as the nature of mind, causality, normativity and so forth). Throughout the paper, I respond to potential objections.
(2012) Another Argument for Animalism -- The Causal Powers Argument: Prolegomena
The causal powers that I have, such as the ability to go to the store for cold beer, are the same causal powers as those had by the human animal closely associated with me. That is, the biological organism that invariably stares back at me, whenever I look in the mirror. Thus, if I want to avoid gratuitous causal overdetermination – i.e. if I want to avoid positing two separate individuals with identical, and thus redundant, causal powers – as I justifiably do, then I should adopt animalism. That is, the view that I have the same persistence conditions as those had by a biological organism.
(2012) Still No Suicide for Presentists -- Why Hales' Response Fails: Logos & Episteme
In this paper, I defend my original objection to Hales’ suicide machine argument against Hales’ response. I argue Hales’ criticisms are either misplaced or underestimate the strength of my objection; if the constraints of the original objection are respected, my original objection blocks Hales’ reply. To be thorough, I restate an improved version of the objection to the suicide machine argument. I conclude that Hales fails to motivate a reasonable worry as to the supposed suicidal nature of presentist time travel.
(2011) No Suicide for Presentists -- A Response to Hales: Logos & Episteme
Steven Hales constructs a novel argument against the possibility of presentist time travel called the suicide machine argument. Hales argues that if presentism were true, then time travel would result in the annihilation of the time traveler. But such a consequence is not time travel, therefore presentism cannot allow for the possibility of time travel. This paper argues that in order for the suicide machine argument to succeed, it must make (at least) one of two assumptions, each of which beg the question. The argument must either assume that the sequence of moments is invariant, or that time travel through time requires distinct, co-instantiated moments. Because the former disjunct assumes that presentist time travel is impossible and the latter assumes that presentism is impossible, the suicide machine argument fails.
POPULAR PUBLICATIONS
(2025) Rights, Fights, and the Economy of Self-Defense: Mises Wire
The right to self-defense is hollow without the practical know-how to actually protect oneself, and mixed martial arts (MMA) provides a brutally honest, decentralized system for discovering what truly works. MMA functions like a market for combat knowledge, using hard-to-fake signals and live testing to filter out ineffective techniques and empower individuals. By supporting this epistemic economy, we affirm not just a moral right to self-defense but the right to access the knowledge necessary to make that defense real.
(2025) Why People Suck at Charity: The Humanist
Though we could easily save lives by giving up small luxuries, most people fail to do so because charity is driven more by reputation and signaling than by genuine altruism. Even anonymous donations often serve hidden signaling purposes, showing that our charitable behavior is shaped by social incentives rather than effectiveness. As a result, it’s much easier — and more common — to look moral than to actually be moral, leading us to be bad at charity in ways that truly help others.
(2025) Exploiting the Moral Unseen: Mises Wire
While price gouging is often seen as exploitative and morally wrong, anti-gouging laws ignore the unseen harms they create, such as black markets and shortages. Suppressing price signals disrupts markets’ ability to allocate resources efficiently, leading to greater long-term suffering despite short-term moral satisfaction. In crises, focusing only on immediate harms overlooks hidden costs — the "moral unseen" — ultimately trading lasting good for fleeting virtue signaling.
(2025) Affirmative Action for Androids: Philosophy Now
If androids achieve self-awareness and moral standing similar to humans, they deserve moral consideration and possibly fair treatment on par with people. Given likely discrimination and human distrust — rooted in evolutionary psychology and the uncanny valley effect — weak affirmative action could help androids overcome systemic disadvantages. Ultimately, supporting androids through such measures isn't just fair but could also signal that those who overcome greater obstacles are often more qualified, strengthening both moral and practical reasons for their inclusion.
(2025) ChatGPT is Bullshit (Partly) Because People are Bullshitters: Liberty Affairs
ChatGPT doesn’t merely generate bullshit because of its architecture. It generates bullshit because it is trained on us. It predicts and completes strings of text based on data drawn from people—people with reputational concerns, tribal affiliations, self-serving biases, and incentives to fudge the truth when it suits them.
(2025) DOGE and 'I, Pencil': The Presser Magazine
Musk’s DOGE faces a major challenge: sorting true government waste from deceptively valuable programs. Like making a pencil, understanding the federal budget is complex and requires hidden know-how. Even well-meaning efforts risk cutting what shouldn't be cut.
(2025) Synthetic Socrates and the Philosophers of the Future: Think
Many philosophers prize finding deep, important philosophical truths such as the nature of right and wrong, the ability to make free choices, and so on. Perhaps, then, it would be better for such philosophers to outsource the search for such truths to entities that are better equipped to the task: artificial philosophers. This suggestion may appear absurd, initially, until we realize that throughout human history outsourcing tasks has been the norm for thousands of years. To the extent such philosophers care about discovering deep philosophical truths, they have a reason to aid in the creation of artificial philosophers who will eventually, in many respects, do philosophy better than even the best human philosopher who ever lived or who will live.
(2025) Why Doc Brown Should Secretly Destroy the DeLorean: Sci Phi Journal
Doc Brown in Back to the Future Part II realizes the dangers of changing the past when he and Marty discover their timeline has gone terribly wrong — for example, George McFly is murdered — after Biff uses the time machine for his own benefit. This leads Doc to understand that time travel can be abused and that the time machine should be destroyed. The point here is to show that Doc Brown is right — even more than he realizes. Fortunately for us, while changing the past is possible in the world of Back to the Future, it is logically impossible in our world because of a famous temporal paradox known as the grandfather paradox.
(2025) What Greta and the Pope Don’t Grasp about Degrowth: American Institute for Economic Research
While degrowth may sound noble, it actually undermines the very social and political institutions — like inclusivity, freedom of inquiry, and market-driven information — that make growth both possible and morally valuable. Degrowth advocates lack the critical price signals and dispersed knowledge that markets provide, making it unclear how to slow the economy effectively without causing more harm. In the end, economic growth isn’t just about wealth; it’s tied to essential moral and political goods that we have strong reasons to protect.
(2024) Perpetuating the Santa Deception: Philosophy Now
Parents seem to act unethically by encouraging children to believe in Santa, violating both the ethics of belief (forming beliefs based on good evidence) and their duty to promote truth. However, the Santa deception can actually help children develop critical thinking skills by challenging them to question authority and evidence — much like an immune system grows stronger through stress. So, while deceptive, the Santa myth might be a valuable learning tool, making it a surprising kind of gift after all.
(2024) The Strange and Future Political Economy of AI: The Independent Review
[In] the near to longer term a major subset of voters will lobby to protect their relationships with artificial intelligence up to and including familial and romantic relationships, whether or not AI has any moral standing.
(2024) The Dark Sides of Transparency: The Independent Review
There is a widespread faith within many democratic societies in the benefits of transparency. Many believe that the government should be mostly transparent to its citizenry, except perhaps with respect to national security. Since citizens participate in governance through voting and other means, citizens within a democratic society should be aware of the actions and decisions of the government tasked with representing their interests. However, despite the benefits enabled or resulting from transparency with respect to democratic governance, transparency has various dark sides with respect to that same governance—as economist Thomas Sowell often observes: there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.
(2024) Helping Social Security by Helping Yourself: American Institute for Economic Research
Not retiring — instead, doing age-appropriate jobs — is at least a partial solution to the prospect of an insolvent Social Security trust fund.
(2024) Signaling Theory and Gender Acceptance: Aporia Magazine
Actions often speak louder than words because costly signals — like expensive rings or higher education — reveal sincerity better than cheap talk. Applying this to gender, medical interventions such as surgery and hormone therapy act as robust, hard-to-fake signals of one's gender identity, helping others understand and accept it. While these signals aren't perfect, they illustrate how costs can clarify intentions in a world where words alone often fail.
(2024) Cows and Sheep: Efficient Recyclers and Moral Subjects: The Montreal Review
When viewed through economic lens, cows and sheep are the ultimate recyclers: they convert what would otherwise be waste – inedible plant material like leaves and husks – into resources such as meat and wool. Unfortunately, though, conflicting moral factors complicate matters.
(2024) Heaps of Trouble: American Institute for Economic Research
The reason sorites logic is so difficult to diffuse is that there is no obvious line or threshold to be established somewhere between the incremental steps that begin with a budget surplus and end with a budget consumed by interest payments.
(2024) My Body, My Speech: Self-Ownership and Freedom of Speech: Think
A popular tactic for defending abortion rights is appealing to bodily self-ownership: since I own my body, a fetus has the right to occupy it only if I consent. One cannot be forced to bring a pregnancy to term because that would violate one’s self-ownership. The same logic applies to speech: we have freedom of speech because we produce speech using the bodies that we own. To curtail that speech violates our self-ownership, or in a phrase: my body, my speech.
(2024) ChatGPT Goes to College: Free Inquiry
A new technological era has dawned with the introduction of tools like Chat GPT and Bard that threaten to upend how the world works, including the operations of higher education. And at the schools where such A.I, tools are banned, a college degree will no longer just signal that one is intelligent, conformist, and conscientious, but also that one is good at avoiding detection when using banned tools like ChatGPT and Bard, and also good at integrating such tools into one's workflow. While graduating from college or university will remain a strong signal to employers, the signal composition will shift somewhat because of A.I.
(2023) Driving Up Fatalities: Why Flight Vaccine Mandates Would (Likely) Backfire: Mises Wire
During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was pressure on governments and airlines to mandate Covid vaccines for travel by flight. Though the vaccines likely reduce the worst aspects of the virus, there is doubt about whether flight mandates would save lives. This paper argues such mandates would likely result in greater fatalities overall: at the margins, vaccine mandates increase the cost of air travel, thereby incentivizing substituting driving for flying. Since driving is more dangerous than flying, this is solid reason to doubt a reduction of travel fatalities because of those mandates.
(2023) Does a Just Society Require Just Citizens? Philosophy Now
There is a solid empirical evidence for moral mediocrity: people aim to be about as morally good, and as morally bad, as those around them. This can be good if most people are saints, and very bad if most people are moral monsters. And here we derive an important insight: we can have a just society without just citizens--that is, citizens who act just only from peer pressure, and not from moral reason--provided most people in that society, for whatever reason, happen to act justly. Even though Kant wouldn't approve, the resulting society would be just.
(2022) Freedom of Expression and the Argument from Self-Defense: Think
Some philosophers hold stifling free expression stifles intellectual life. Others reply that freedom of expression can harm members of marginalized groups by alienating them from social life or worse. Yet we should favor freedom of expression, especially where marginalized groups are concerned: it’s better to know who has repugnant beliefs as it allows those groups to identify threats—that is, free expression as self-defense.
(2017) Santa Claus and the Problem of Evil: Philosophy Now
There are many profound philosophical issues involving Santa. For example, we might wonder how we know that Santa doesn’t exist. That is, although it seems obvious that there is no Santa, the reasons usually given for this disbelief are less sound than is often appreciated. In this article I want to explore an argument against Santa that shares a number of features with the problem of evil that has long troubled theologians. This argument against Santa is one way we can know that he doesn’t exist, but without the same vulnerabilities that the usual reasons have.
(2014) The Shuffling Machine and Metaphysical Fatalism: Think
In this paper, I outline a toy argument for metaphysical fatalism – i.e. there is no sense in which the world could have been different than it is. First, I explain a couple of assumptions that I make about the nature of time. These assumptions appear to be plausible and widely held – or, at least, they are reasonable positions to hold. Second, I outline and explain a thought experiment designed to bring our fatalist-friendly intuitions to the forefront.
(2013) Moral Manipulation and the Problem of Evil: Philosophy Now
Although it is good to have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, the free-will defense gets the moral weights wrong. It places too much weight on freedom, and not enough weight on the lives and well-being of innocents. Put differently, the free-will defense simply gets the moral facts wrong.
(2012) The Immorality of Procreation: Think
Many people hold that procreation is morally obligatory; one ought to bring children into existence because they benefit by being brought into existence. Often this line of thinking stems from the notion that procreation is intrinsically valuable; procreation should be pursued for its own sake. Other philosophers hold procreation is immoral because of the great harm it causes as a result of climate change, overpopulation, mental illness, and so forth. If current population growth continues, there will be an ever-shrinking supply of fresh water and food, leading to the suffering of future generations.