Research
Philosophy of Science (2023)
Abstract: Absolute and relative outcome measures measure a treatment’s effect size, purporting to inform treatment choices. I argue that absolute measures are at least as good as, if not better than, relative ones for informing rational decisions across choice scenarios. Specifically, this dominance of absolute measures holds for choices between a treatment and a control group treatment from a trial and for ones between treatments tested in different trials. This distinction has hitherto been neglected, just like the role of absolute and baseline risks in decision-making that my analysis reveals. Recognizing both aspects advances the discussion on reporting outcome measures.
KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy (2021)
Report on an annual graduate student conference at the University of Salzburg
Erasmus Student Journal of Philosophy (2021)
Abstract: Thomas Rowe and Alex Voorhoeve (2018) extend a pluralist egalitarian theory of distributive justice to decisions under so-called severe uncertainty. The proposed extension allows for trading off the pluralist egalitarian concern of avoiding inequality (inequality aversion) with an attitude many people seem to exhibit, namely the concern to avoid severe uncertainty (uncertainty aversion). In this paper, I argue that the proposed pluralist egalitarianism should be adjusted for situations in which uncertainty aversion conflicts with inequality aversion. When deciding what to do in such cases, a concern to avoid uncertainty should not be considered. Instead, even uncertainty averse people ought to choose as if they were not uncertainty averse. They may then decide depending on how inequality averse they are.
Master thesis (unpublished)
Abstract: We typically explain phenomena by citing their causes. Yet, we also explain phenomena without citing their causes, for instance by referring instead to mathematical theorems. To account for the explanatory power of such non-causal explanations, several philosophers aim to free the interventionist theory of causal explanation from its causal component: interventions. The resulting counterfactual theory of causal and non-causal explanation claims that X explains Y iff Y counterfactually depends on changes in X. While initially attractive, such a counterfactual theory faces a familiar problem: explanations are typically asymmetric while not all counterfactual dependence is. The challenge of asymmetry demands to qualify a counterfactual theory such as to account for the asymmetry of explanations. First, I reject two potential solutions to this challenge: amendments of a counterfactual theory using Lewisian semantics or two inference schemes that tell us when to infer that X explains Y and not vice versa. Second, I develop a quasi-interventionist version of a counterfactual theory apt to deal with explanatory asymmetry, in two steps. I identify a class of explanations that a counterfactual theory without further specification already claims to be asymmetric. And I develop the notion of a quasi-intervention to account for the asymmetry of most remaining explanations. The resulting quasi-interventionist theory claims that X explains Y iff Y counterfactually depends on changes in X brought about by a quasi-intervention. Finally, I suggest accepting the symmetry this quasi-interventionist theory entails for a particular class of non-causal explanations.