Overview:

My main research area is normative ethics. I am currently working on (i) population ethics and our obligations to future generations and (ii) a set of issues concerning the nature of well-being, with an emphasis on the significance of temporal and modal features.

Beyond that, I work on epistemology. I have written about knowledge-how, skill, epistemic luck, and suspension of judgment. Currently, I am thinking about epistemic consequentialism and pragmatic encroachment.

I also have a strong interest in distinctively practical ethics. Johann Frick and I are co-teaching an upper-level undergraduate seminar on Ethics of Emerging Technologies at Princeton in the spring of 2021, in which we discuss topics such as: existential risk, privacy and surveillance, algorithmic bias, the future of work, and autonomous vehicles.

Publications:

4. What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?. Utilitas. (forthcoming). (with Stéphane Zuber and 27 co-authors) [abstract]

Abstract: The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

3. Schopenhauer on Suicide and Negation of the Will. The British Journal for the History of Philosophy. (2021). [abstract]

Abstract: Schopenhauer's argument against suicide has served as a punching bag for many modern-day commentators. Dale Jacquette, Sandra Shapshay, and David Hamlyn all argue that the premises of this argument or its conclusion are inconsistent with Schopenhauer's wider metaphysical and ethical project. This paper defends Schopenhauer from these charges. Along the way, it examines the relations between suicide, death by voluntary starvation, negation of the will, compassion, and Schopenhauer's critiques of cynicism and stoicism. The paper concludes that there may be gaps in Schopenhauer's system, but not where the aforementioned commentators tried to locate them.

2. On Parfit's Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle. The Philosophical Quarterly. (2020). [abstract]

Abstract: In the posthumously published 'Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles' (2017), Derek Parfit presents a novel axiological principle which he calls the Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle and claims that it does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion. This paper shows that even the best version of Parfit's principle cannot avoid this conclusion. That said, accepting such a principle makes embracing the Repugnant Conclusion more justifiable. This paper further addresses important questions which Parfit left unanswered concerning: the relative importance of individual and collective goodness, comparisons involving unequal outcomes, how to understand individual goodness, and whether incomparability at the level of individual goodness implies incomparability at the level of overall goodness.

1. Friedman on Suspended Judgment. Synthese. (2020). [abstract]

Abstract: In a series of articles, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order question-directed attitude and that one suspends judgment on some matter if and only if one genuinely inquires into this matter. This paper responds to Friedman's arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of this attitude and raises worries about the details of her positive claim that one suspends iff one inquires. It subsequently defends a novel reductive higher-order propositional account of suspended judgment.