Research Projects
Research Projects
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 (Under Review)
In ethics, many find the following principle plausible: all else is equal, we ought to choose among our best options. This constrained maximizing principle is more modest and more appealing than an unconstrained maximizing principle endorsed by consequentialists. Moreover, it offers an appealing view about how value informs our moral judgments: in the absence of deontic violations or injustices, value is guiding.
However, many puzzle cases in population ethics, like the Mere Addition Paradox, challenge this principle, because many options in these cases involve no deontic violations. In particular, they invoke a series of pairwise deontic judgments that together violate the transitivity of binary choice ('between A and B, one ought to choose A over B'). This violation means that in these cases, the pairwise judgments cannot all be explained as maximizing a single overall betterness relation (which is commonly taken to be transitive). We are seemingly left with two options: reject some of these judgments, or reject constrained maximizing.
In this paper, I offer an alternative to constrained maximizing that preserves the key idea behind it. I show that we can dispense with the idea of overall betterness without dispensing with the idea that value is guiding. Relying only on modest value claims about what is good for groups of individuals, I show that given some plausible maximizing principles motivated by stability, we can explain all the judgments involved in these puzzle cases as maximizing a family of value relations.
Colonialism and Imperialism (In Progress)
(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 Feminism.