•  13
    Complaints and tournament population ethics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (2): 344-367. 2021.
    In this paper, I develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are permitted to do in virtue of the possible complaints against our action. This task is made difficult by a serious problem that arises when we attempt to generalize the view from two-option to many-option cases. The solution makes two significant moves – first, accepting that complaints are essentially pairwise comparative, and second, reimagining decision-making as a tournament between options competing two at a…Read more
  •  48
    Complaints and tournament population ethics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (2): 344-367. 2021.
    In this paper, I develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are permitted to do in virtue of the possible complaints against our action. This task is made difficult by a serious problem that arises when we attempt to generalize the view from two-option to many-option cases. The solution makes two significant moves – first, accepting that complaints are essentially pairwise comparative, and second, reimagining decision-making as a tournament between options competing two at a…Read more
  •  82
    Partiality, Identity, and Procreation
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 49 (1): 51-77. 2021.
    Philosophy & Public Affairs, EarlyView.
  •  972
    Tournament decision theory
    Noûs 56 (1): 176-203. 2020.
    The dispute in philosophical decision theory between causalists and evidentialists remains unsettled. Many are attracted to the causal view’s endorsement of a species of dominance reasoning, and to the intuitive verdicts it gets on a range of cases with the structure of the infamous Newcomb’s Problem. But it also faces a rising wave of purported counterexamples and theoretical challenges. In this paper I will describe a novel decision theory which saves what is appealing about the causal view wh…Read more
  •  330
    Rational Delay
    Philosophers' Imprint 17. 2017.
    Finite agents such as human beings have reasoning and updating processes that are extended in time; consequently, there is always some lag between the point at which we gain new reasons and the point at which our attitudes have fully responded to those reasons. This phenomenon, which I call rational delay, poses a threat to the most common ways of formulating rational requirements on our attitudes, which do not allow rational beings to exhibit such delay. In this paper, I show first how this pro…Read more
  •  555
    Normative Uncertainty and the Dependence Problem
    Mind 129 (513): 43-70. 2020.
    In this paper, I enter the debate between those who hold that our normative uncertainty matters for what we ought to do, and those who hold that only our descriptive uncertainty matters. I argue that existing views in both camps have unacceptable implications in cases where our descriptive beliefs depend on our normative beliefs. I go on to propose a fix which is available only to those who hold that normative uncertainty matters, ultimately leaving the challenge as a threat to recent skepticism…Read more
  •  904
    The Diner’s Defence: Producers, Consumers, and the Benefits of Existence
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 64-77. 2020.
    One popular defence of moral omnivorism appeals to facts about the indirectness of the diner’s causal relationship to the suffering of farmed animals. Another appeals to the claim that farmed animals would not exist but for our farming practices. The import of these claims, I argue, has been misunderstood, and the standard arguments grounded in them fail. In this paper, I develop a better argument in defence of eating meat which combines resources from both of these strategies, together with pri…Read more
  •  34
  •  1079
    Wouldn't it be Nice? Moral Rules and Distant Worlds
    Noûs 52 (2): 279-294. 2018.
    Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In …Read more
  •  423
    A Reply to the Synchronist
    Mind 125 (499): 859-871. 2016.
    On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the combinations of attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention, that they possess at particular times, and for the ways that they behave cognitively over time, by forming, reconsidering, and updating those attitudes. Accordingly, philosophers have proposed norms of rationality that are synchronic—concerned fundamentally with our individual time-slices, and diachronic—concerned with our temporally ext…Read more
  •  88
    Dynamic Conservatism
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3 (13): 349-376. 2016.
    According to a family of views under the label of epistemic conservatism, the fact that one already believes something can make it rational to continue to believe it. A number of philosophers have found conservatism attractive, but traditional views are vulnerable to several powerful criticisms. In this paper, I develop an alternative to standard views by identifying a widespread assumption shared by conservatives and their critics - that rational norms govern states of mind like belief, and sho…Read more
  •  431
    Dynamic permissivism
    Philosophical Studies 173 (7): 1923-1939. 2016.
    There has been considerable philosophical debate in recent years over a thesis called epistemic permissivism. According to the permissivist, it is possible for two agents to have the exact same total body of evidence and yet differ in their belief attitudes towards some proposition, without either being irrational. However, I argue, not enough attention has been paid to the distinction between different ways in which permissivism might be true. In this paper, I present a taxonomy of forms of epi…Read more