Moral reasoning is essential to the forming of justified moral beliefs and, ultimately, to reliably morally right action. However, a necessary precursor to substantively good reasoning in any domain is to have good data about that domain. What is the source of our most basic moral data? My research defends the view that basic moral data is grounded in valenced perceptual experiences, viz. the binding of evaluative content to experienced perceptual representations. In my earlier work, I defended the plausibility of this view and its epistemic payoffs from a variety of philosophical objections.

However, in order to defend a full-blown moral empiricism, I go further. In work currently in progress, I give compelling empirical evidence that evaluations and social interaction types are both encoded in perceptual processing and likely represented in the downstream perceptual experience. Not only that, but evaluations perceptually bind to social interaction types, thus representing them as good or bad. Finally, in further work, I provide a metasemantic argument that a subset of these valenced social perceptual experiences involve the representation of moral evaluations. These moral evaluations become the basic ‘moral data’ which feeds into moral deliberation, whether conceived of as reflective equilibrium or some other process. 

Some of this work was generously funded by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation, entitled "Moral Perception: How It Works and Why It Matters".

In a forthcoming paper for Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, I introduce the concept of "patient moral luck," a phenomenon that has been largely ignored in normative ethics. Consider two people in a similarly precarious financial situation, Octavia and Solita. The only difference between Octavia and Solita is that Octavia has several siblings while Solita is an only child. All else equal, this means that there are more people who have stronger reasons to support Octavia than there are to help Solita. In other words, Octavia exerts stronger moral force on more people than Solita, where “moral force” is the amount, strength, and direction (positive or negative) of moral reasons that a moral patient’s well-being normatively exerts on others. I argue that these differences scale up over time and across relationships, resulting in a morally sanctioned unequal treatment of some individuals, which conflicts with the idea of equal treatment of persons.

Thinking in terms of the concept of moral force has broader implications for moral theory than just "patient moral luck". It challenges the assumption that step-wise moral principles are sufficient, revealing the need for end-state considerations in ethics, similar to the distinction between Historical and End-State theories of distributive justice in political philosophy. In the broader project, I will argue that moral theory must impose limits on the distributions of moral consideration to prevent unjust patterns of moral force across moral patients.

Social and political philosophy is a discipline as old as philosophy itself. As with other subdisciplines, the range of views defended historically is vast and diverse. However, in the analytic tradition, social and political philosophy has seen much of its concentration narrow since  the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Despite the justifiable influence of this work, it has unfortunately led to a dearth of theorizing about the political philosophy of many activist, on-the-ground political movements. In this project, I focus on an increasingly popular structural tendency within activist social and political movements called Horizontalism. Horizontalist institutions are, at least formally, leaderless, making decisions through group discussion which aims at consensus among all stakeholders. 

The aims of this project are threefold. First, I want to analytically explore an important political tradition which exists outside of - and often in direct opposition to - the current mainstream of analytic political theory. Second, and in part as a means to achieve the first goal, I am exploring a variety of philosophical issues related to consensus-based decision making: Its normative motivations, its implications for theories of group agency, and its limitations. Third, and relatedly, I aim to ‘translate’ some of the traditionalist horizontalist arguments against liberal democratic theory into the conceptual framework of analytic political philosophy, so that they can be assessed on fair terms. 

Though I have received a small grant for work on this project in 2024, as of yet, none of the work is published.

I also have worked on a variety of other issues, such as the metasemantics of normative concepts, the contents of perceptual experience, the epistemology of intuitions, and issues in normative ethics such as obligations to learn and the ethics of voting. 

I suppose I like to keep a few irons in the fire simply because too much is interesting!