Work in Progress

Here are some of the papers I'm currently working on. If you are interested, contact me and I can share the latest draft. I would be more happy to receive feedback.

• 'Triggering Reason-Giving and Exclusive Legal Positivism' - I argue that the thesis that reasons can only be given by way of triggering, legal rationalism, and exclusive legal positivism, are jointly inconsistent, and that we should not abandon legal rationalism. Thus, if one wants to remain a legal positivist, one should abandon the triggering-only hypothesis.

• 'Obligations, Exclusionary Reasons, and Accountability' - I argue against Raz's account of obligations in terms of categorical protected reasons, and sketched an alternative accounability account of obligations (which tries to accomodate the idea that obligation have exclusionary force).

• 'On (the Disunity of) Normative Powers' - I argue that exercises of normative powers give reasons directly rather than by way of triggering, and discuss different ways in which normative powers so understood could be grounded, including Raz's value view (which I reject), and a conventional view (an alternative which I try to develop in some detail).

• 'An Accountability-First Account of the Normativity of Law' - The law claims to (i) give us reasons to act as it requires, and to (ii) make us accountable for so acting. According to a fairly standard view, these two claims are related as follows. The law gives us reasons to act as it requires, and it is precisely because we have reasons of a certain kind to act as it requires that we are accountable for so acting. On this view, reason-giving comes first in the order of explanation. Call this the Reasons First account. Here I defend an alternative picture: the law makes us accountable for acting as it requires in virtue of considerations that are not reasons for so acting, and it is precisely because we are so accountable that we have a reason (ie, a second-personal reason) to so act. Thus, it is accountability-making that comes first in the order of explanation. Call this the Accountability First account. The key here is that there are facts that can make us accountable for conforming to the law without counting in favour of doing so. I shall explain how this is possible by relying on an account of conventional normativity. 

• 'How Not to Argue Against Exclusive Legal Positivism' - I reject two common arguments against ELP according to which it leads to wildly implausible results regarding the content of law of contemporary legal systems.

• 'Hedden on Algorithmic Fairness' - I argue against Hedden's claim that Calibration Within Groups is a necessary condition for predictive algorithms to be fair, and against his claim that failure to satisfy other statistical criteria (like, say, Equal Positive Predictive Value) cannot be a ground of unfairness.