Research Projects
Research Projects
Asymmetries of Normative Reasons (forthcoming in Australasian Journal of Philosophy)
I argue that the procreative asymmetry has plausible epistemic and prudential analogues concerning the acquisition of new beliefs and desires. I hypothesize that these could be instances of a more fundamental asymmetry in our value-based reasons. I provide a unified account that explains all three asymmetries together to support that hypothesis.
Living Without Overall Betterness (Draft Available Upon Request)
Some important puzzles in population ethics (like the Mere Addition Paradox) can be seen as tempting us to endorse a series of pairwise deontic judgments that together violate the transitivity of binary choice ('one ought to choose A over B'). This violation means that in these cases, the pairwise judgments cannot all be explained in a simple maximizing framework, where one ought to choose A over B just in case A is overall better than B. It seems like we are left with two options: reject some of these judgments, or accept that some of these judgments are explained in non-value terms, even if the relevant choices involve no rights violations or injustices.
In this paper, I offer a third option. I defend an account that explains the intransitive deontic judgments that arise in these puzzles purely in value terms. The key move, as I demonstrate, is to refrain from appealing to judgments about overall betterness altogether. Instead, I rely on some very plausible value claims about what is good for groups of people. These betterness-for-group value relations are more natural and much less controversial than claims about overall betterness. I defend a pairwise deontic principle motivated by stability considerations that tell us what to do in light of these multifarious value relations. Lastly, I defend a tournament solution that generalizes this pairwise principle to also give us verdicts about choices with more than two options. This tournament solution, I argue, can give us verdicts in line with the spirit of the axiology of betterness-for-groups. This account can also help us not only to grapple with the seemingly paradoxical implications of the Procreative Asymmetry, but also to avoid a deontic version of the Repugnant Conclusion.
Colonialism and Imperialism (In Progress) - to be presented at the PPE London Society 2025
(Co-author with Anthony Nguyen): while imperialism and colonialism have often been used interchangeably in philosophy and history, we argue that a distinction can be made. While some senses of the word "colonialism" are morally innocuous (i.e. colonizing Mars), we argue that there is a sense of the word that involves a necessary pro tanto moral wrong, just like how words like "sexism" and "racism" are commonly used. More importantly, we argue that its necessary wrongs are different from that of imperialism. This distinction, we argue, can help us precisely characterize the different wrongs committed by historical empires, and also offer us a new way of looking at historical instances of colonialism and imperialism. One such implication is that on our account, there were colonial practices before the Age of Exploration done by non-Europeans (contrary to what some historians claim), just like there were sexist practices in history before the feminism movement ever came to be.