Selected Papers

AI Ethics, Adoption, & Governance

An Institutional Taxonomy of Adoption of Innovation in the Classic Professions, Cordasco, C., Gherhes, C., Brooks, C., & Vorley, T. Technovation (2021).

Ethics & Business

Political Philosophy 

Revise & Resubmit

Under Review

Works in Progress 

Commitment under Evaluative Uncertainty With Alessandro Sontuoso

Institutions require decision-makers to commit to evaluative criteria before encountering the cases those criteria must govern. Commitment enables verification but restricts rules to depend only on pre-specified dimensions, and when the relevant dimensions are uncertain, the restricted class may exclude the optimal rule. We extend the preference-for-flexibility framework from menus of alternatives to menus of decision rules, where the restriction is a verifiability condition. In a linear-Gaussian environment, a single object—the conditional covariance between committed and uncommitted dimensions—governs the accuracy cost of commitment across action spaces and loss functions.

Understanding Without Grounding? Pragmatic Structure, Linguistic Compression, and the Conditions of Competence in Language-Trained Systems

A familiar objection to the possibility of understanding in large language models holds that systems trained on language alone lack the non-linguistic grounding required for genuine competence. I argue that a significant class of failures attributed to the absence of sensory grounding are better explained by the pragmatic structure of the training signal. Language produced under cooperative conversational norms is systematically optimised to omit what speakers can cheaply recover from shared context. A system trained on such language inherits a communicative practice that presupposes a common ground it does not possess. This reframing does not settle whether any current system understands, but it shows that the evidential basis for the grounding objection is weaker than it appears.

The Stakeholder Dilemma: Person-Affecting Evaluation and the Problem of Future Generations

Stakeholder theory is widely regarded as the natural home for intergenerational concern in business ethics. I argue that this extension is structurally incoherent. Stakeholder theory's evaluative apparatus depends on identifying determinate constituencies whose interests can be specified and weighed. When the theory extends to non-overlapping future persons, it confronts the non-identity problem: corporate decisions of sufficient scope determine which future persons will exist, and person-affecting evaluation loses its determinate subject. Shareholder theories face no analogous dilemma because the tradeable-claim mechanism, indirect reciprocity, and the structural features of the corporate form handle the temporal dimension institutionally.

Institutions as Lossy Compression

Institutions are constitutively lossy compressions of the informational environments in which they operate. To treat an arrangement as an institution, on the account developed here, is to treat it as performing a specific kind of informational operation, one that takes a high-dimensional input and produces a lower-dimensional representation which the relevant community sustains collectively and treats as authoritative for the situations the arrangement governs. The account is descriptively extensive enough to capture the full range of things ordinarily called institutions, including social norms, conventions, formal rules, and organised bodies, without collapsing into everything that structures action; and it has consequences for the analysis of institutional suboptimality, of institutional failure, and of the relation between institutions and the algorithmic systems increasingly occupying domains institutions have historically governed.

Book Project