RESEARCH (email me for drafts)

My main project contends with a few interrelated questions. First, how do we talk about injustices that don't straightforwardly result from particular actions by particular agents? Sometimes, states of affairs are unjust without that injustice being the work of some particular agent or group of agents. Call this phenomenon "structural injustice". The problem is that our moral discourse and our philosophical theorizing about it generally tend to foreground judgments about agents and actions. We have a sophisticated philosophical vocabulary for talking about agency, action and obligation. This vocabulary sits uncomfortably in judgments about the normative properties of social structures. And we don't really have a corresponding set of conceptual tools for talking about structural injustice.  

Second, liberalism is generally committed to the importance of economic growth and prosperity. However, this commitment faces important challenges from two directions. Contemporary events like climate change make it more difficult to reconcile economic growth with other liberal commitments, as do traditional Left challenges, especially on the grounds of inequality. Much of my work is dedicated to exploring whether a broadly liberal political outlook can meet these challenges.

Below are my publications and some works in progress, organized by topic. Email me for drafts/preprints.

Methodology and Structural Injustice:

• • Putting the "Structural" back in "Structural Injustice" (with Jake Monaghan) (Ethics): Estlund argues that theories of structural injustice have to show how victims can have warranted grievances, generally expressed through reactive attitudes. But he argues that no social structure can by itself be the target or warranted grievance. We argue that warrant for reactive attitudes is an inappropriate standard to hold theories of structural injustice to, because reactive attitudes are tightly connected to the mental states that motivate actions. This connection entails that reactive attitudes presuppose that agents are the perpetrators of injustice. But the point of the idea of structural injustice is that this presupposition is often unwarranted.

  • Structural Injustice and the Tyranny of Scales (Journal of Moral Philosophy): I argue that our models of moral judgment face what scientists call a "tyranny of scales" problem. In physical science, the mathematical tools used for describing a phenomenon that occurs at one characteristic scale may be ill-suited for describing other phenomena in the same system that operate at smaller or larger characteristic scales. The Navier-Stokes equations that we use to accurately describe turbulent fluid flow are partial differential equations that model fluids as continua. Now, as we all know, fluids are made of molecules; but if you try to model turbulent fluid flow by aggregating features of individual molecules and their interactions, your model will go haywire. Similarly, I argue that we shouldn't attempt to describe structural or political injustice in terms of moral relationships among pairs of individual agents. Rather, we ought to describe it in terms of properties that arise only at large scale.

  • "Structural Injustice" as an Analytical Tool (Philosophy Compass): “Structural Injustice” refers to injustices that can't be attributed to particular actions by bad actors. This article surveys Iris Marion Young's influential account of structural injustice; lays out some considerations related to the concept's use as an analytical tool; and critically surveys Young's account of individual responsibility for structural injustice.

Liberalism and Prosperity:

• Cash Rules Everything Around Me: In Defence of Housing Markets (Economics and Philosophy): I argue that alienation objections to housing markets face a dilemma. Either they purport to explain distributive injustices, or they hold that markets are objectionable on intrinsic grounds. The first disjunct is empirically dubious. The second undermines the motivation for objecting to housing markets, and overgeneralizes: if markets are objectionable due to alienation, so are all forms of large-scale cooperation. 

• The Body Politic Has Private Parts: Market Creation as a Policymaking Tool (Economics and Philosophy):  Philosophical arguments about government contracting either categorically oppose it on legitimacy grounds or see it as largely anodyne. I argue for a normatively distinct kind of contracting--the advance market commitment, or AMC--and show that it is justified by the same liberal values that justify the welfare state.

• Stasis Undermines Equality (Under Review)

• The Normative Significance of State Capacity (In Preparation)

• This Land is Our Land: The Critique of Gentrification in the Defense of Blood and Soil (Under Review)

• Political Philosophy is Not Metaphysics (In Preparation)

• Alienation Arguments (Under Review)

Other Papers:

• • What's New in the New Ideology Critique? (Philosophical Studies): I argue that contemporary accounts of ideology critique--paradigmatically those advanced by Haslanger, Jaeggi, Celikates, and Stanley--are either inadequate or redundant. Ideologies are sets of distorted social meanings or shared understandings. I first argue in this paper that because agents must coordinate on them to be mutually intelligible, ideologies, on the fashionable contemporary account, are conventions. Proponents of ideology critique argue that if social theorists can identify the ways in which bad social arrangements are upheld by ideological distortions, the scales will fall from agents' eyes and we'll have made strides to remedy those bad social arrangements. changing pernicious conventions requires more than the epistemic remedy contemporary critical social theorists prescribe. It also requires overcoming strategic impediments like high first-mover costs. Thus contemporary proponents of ideology critique--the "new ideology critics," as I'll call them--face a dilemma. Either their account of social change fails to account for important strategic impediments to social change, in which case it is inadequate, or it incorporates a theory of strategic behavior, and thus merely reinvents the wheel, poorly.