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)
Many puzzles in population ethics can be seen as challenging the transitivity of overall betterness. In this paper, I argue that we can explain many deontic claims we want to make in these puzzles without making any claims about overall betterness. Instead, I show that by appealing to very plausible and natural claims about what is good for groups of people, along with a deontic principle about how to make decisions based on these value relations, we can explain the Procreative Asymmetry, defend the non-identity intuition, and soften the blow of the Repugnant Conclusion.
Weakening of Contraction Consistency and Stable-Rationalizability (In Progress)
It is usually thought that once a choice function violates contraction consistency, the only recourse we have to explain it in terms of "maximizing" one's preferences is to pursue a menu-dependent framework where each choice set is explained by a preference relation relativized to it. This strikes many as trivial, not action guiding, and not very explanatory. I offer a middle ground. In this paper, I defend a consistency constraint even weaker than contraction consistency, and show that if we also understand rationalizability in a slightly different way, we can prove non-trivial rationalizability results in this framework that can prove to be very philosophically fruitful.
Colonialism and Imperialism (In Progress)
(Co-author with Anthony Nguyen): while imperialism and colonialism have often been conflated in philosophical literature, we argue that for a normative account of imperialism and colonialism, we should set aside the non-normative features and distinguish them based on the distinct moral wrongs they involve. Our distinction can also offer plausible diagnoses of various historical examples, such as the Japanese Colonization of the Ainu, the Mongolian Empire, and even puts earlier instances of either (the Roman Epire & Hellenization) in clearer lights.