Research
Incompleteness/Unsharpness
Most of my published research focuses on a cluster of issues around incomplete preferences, unsharp or imprecise credences, and value incommensurability. In one sense of the word, two items are incommensurate if neither is better but they are also not precisely equally good. I’ve written a short introduction to incommensurability on its PhilPapers page.
In my book manuscript ‘Vagueness in Action’, I argue that these phenomena are all vagueness. I then defend a decision rule for vague preferences and credences, argue that this avoids some of their nasty consequences (so-called ‘value pumps’) and copes with some related puzzles, most importantly Warren Quinn’s Puzzle of the Self-Torturer and Spectrum Arguments for the intransitivity of ‘better than’. I’m happy to share drafts–please email me.
(2021) What does incommensurability tell us about agency? in Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk, and Decision-Making, edited by Henrik Andersson and Anders Herlitz. Routledge.
(2017) Incommensurability as Vagueness: a Burden-Shifting Argument, Theoria 83: 341-363. doi: 10.1111/theo.12129
(preprint)(2016) Tenenbaum and Raffaman on Vague Projects, the Self-Torturer, and the Sorites, in Ethics Vol. 126, No. 2, pp. 474-488. doi:10.1086/683533.
(journal page)(2014) Heaps and Chains: is the Chaining Argument for Parity a Sorites?, Ethics Vol. 124, No. 3, pp. 557-571. doi: 10.1086/674844
(journal page)(2014) Borderline Cases and the Collapsing Principle, Utilitas volume 26, issue 01, pp. 51-60. doi:10.1017/S095382081300023X
(journal page)
Global Normative Nihilism
In more straightforwardly metaethical terrain, I have a number of unpublished papers defending Global Normative Nihilism, which is moral error theory’s more aggressive sibling. Not only categorical/external but also hypothetical/internal resons claims are false. I argue that this view avoids (or embraces) ‘companions in guilt’ responses to queerness arguments for the moral error theory, and that it offers radical conceptual as well as metaphysical simplicity. It is a depressing (nihilistic!) view, but I argue that it won’t lead to a complete loss of motivation or subjective concern, as some have argued.
(Forthcoming) No Point of View Except Ours?, Topoi special issue on the legacy of Bernard Williams.
(2021) Review of Companions in Guilt Arguments in Metaethics edited by Christopher Cowie and Richard Rowland, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
(2019) Probabilistic Promotion and Ability, Ergo vol. 6, no. 34. doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0006.034
(2019) Can Streumer simply avoid Supervenience?, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy vol. 16, no. 3. doi:10.26556/jesp.v16i3.508
(2018) Review of David Sobel’s From Valuing to Value, Analysis, Volume 78, Issue 3, pp. 583-586. doi:10.1093/analys/any045.
Normative and Practical Ethics
Despite nihilistic tendencies, I have lately also become more interested in questions in normative or practical ethics.
(Forthcoming) A paper on healthcare marketisation and the introduction of risk into the doctor-patient relationship. Promised to a Ratio special issue on risk.
(Forthcoming) ‘The Only Moral Flight is My Flight’, which defends carbon offsets against charges of injustice. Promised to an Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics special issue on intra- and interpersonal dilemmas in ethics and rational choice.