Research

Publications

(please reach out for citable versions if you lack access)


Abstract: Why act when the effects of one’s act are negligible? For example, why boycott sweat-shop or animal products if doing so makes no difference for the better? According to recent proposals, one may still have a reason to boycott in order to avoid complicity or participation in harm. Julia Nefsky has argued that accounts of this kind suffer from the so-called “superfluity problem,” basically the question of why agents can be said to participate in harm if they make no difference to it. This paper develops and responds to Nefsky’s challenge.

Abstract: In this journal (AJP 2016), Vishnu Sridharan presents a novel objection to attributionism, the view according to which agents are responsible for their conduct when it reflects who they are or what they value. The key to Sridharan's objection is that agents can fulfil all attributionist conditions for responsibility while being under the control of a manipulator. In this paper, we show that Sridharan's objection falls prey to a dilemma—either his manipulator is counterfactually robust, or she is not—and that neither of its horns undermines attributionism.

You can find my Google Scholar profile here.


Work in Progress 

(reach out for drafts)


...in which we defend and expand our earlier account (in “Participation and Superfluity,” 2020) in response to objections by Julia Nefsky (“Participation, Collective Impact, and Your Instrumental Significance,” Journal of Practical Ethics, forthcoming). We argue that Nefsky's own helping-based account falls prey to similar objections (and can borrow the same solution).


...in which I note that there is an important normative distinction between collective harm-by-omission cases and mere-failure-to-benefit cases. I suggest that this normative distinction arises due to the presence of requiring reasons in the former cases (and their absence in the latter cases). Moreover, paying attention to the distinction between requiring and other sorts of reasons is necessary to account for (all-things-considered) obligations in collective action contexts. I show how other accounts in the literature fail to make sense of the relevant distinctions, and are less extensionally adequate for it.



...in which I defend a contextualist view about the epistemic standards on treating p as a reason (or: “premising” that p). On this account, the epistemic standard required to permissibly premise that p is contextually determined. A contextualist account of this sort must answer the positionality question: how does an agent’s context determine the epistemic position they must be in vis-à-vis p in order for them to permissibly premise that p? I answer that the goals of an agent's practical deliberation set these standards. I argue that Goal-Sensitive Contextualism is well-positioned to account for a range of cases, as well as to make sense of our ordinary practices of criticizing and defending our own and others’ practical deliberation. Moreover, I argue it is better positioned to do so than other accounts in the literature, to wit, the knowledge norm, the practical certainty norm, and the epistemic certainty norm.


...in which I argue that harm and benefit are multi-pronged. Harming (benefiting) S has three dimensions: (1) bringing it about that S is in a non-comparatively bad (good) state; (2) bringing it about that S is temporally worse (better) off; (3) bringing it about that S is counterfactually worse (better) off. These three dimensions interact in somewhat complex yet systematic ways to determine overall harm and benefit.

This view, I argue, does significantly better than some extant views on a number of desiderata. It is highly unified, explanatorily powerful, and extensionally adequate. It also preserves the normative importance of harm (and benefit), as well a close and natural connection with leading theories of causation, grounding, and omission.


...in which I argue that one can be morally worthy when acting for an act's moral rightness as such and for an act's right-making features, and that one is optimally praiseworthy when acting for both.



...in which I argue that an agent failing to perform the right act in a range of counterfactual circumstances undermines her moral praiseworthiness, and I defend this view from two commonly raised objections in the literature: that this conflates moral praiseworthiness and moral virtue, and that this flouts the pertinence constraint, which says that the only motives determining the moral worth of an act are the actual (as opposed to counterfactual) motives on which the agent acts.