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30The Egalitarian Objection to CoercionPacific Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.Coercion is morally objectionable: it’s bad to be coerced and it’s wrong to coerce people. But why is coercion objectionable? In this paper, I advance an egalitarian account of what’s objectionable about coercion. The account is rooted in the idea that certain relationships, like those of master to slave and lord to peasant, are relationships of subordination or domination. These relationships are morally objectionable. Moreover, such relationships are in part constituted by asymmetries of power…Read more
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225The good life as the life in touch with the goodPhilosophical Studies 181 (5): 1141-1165. 2024.What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest …Read more
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317Commonsense Morality and Contact with ValuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 1-21. 2024.There seem to be many kinds of moral duties. We should keep our promises; we should pay our debts of gratitude; we should compensate those we’ve wronged; we should avoid doing or intending harm; we should help those in need. These constitute, some worry, an unconnected heap of duties: the realm of commonsense morality is a disorganized mess. In this paper, we outline a strategy for unifying commonsense moral duties. We argue that they can be understood in terms of contact with value. You are in …Read more
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61Democratic Failures and the Ethics of DemocracyUniversity of Pennsylvania Press. 2024.This book is about the ways in which real-world democracies fall short of democratic ideals and why those shortfalls matter. The project is rooted in a vast body of empirical findings that political scientists have accumulated over the last seven decades. These are findings about political ignorance, voter behaviour, the policymaking process, polarization, and the popular control of representatives. These findings are often both surprising and troubling—they suggest our democracies fall far shor…Read more
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182Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen, eds. (review)Economics and Philosophy 1 (1): 244-249. 2023.
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187Should Canada have oaths of allegiance?Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 1. 2023.The Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration has recently proposed to make in-person citizenship ceremonies optional. These ceremonies are oaths of allegiances: naturalizing citizens swear loyalty to King Charles and obedience to the laws of Canada. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration proposes to allow naturalizing citizens to take these oaths by checking a box online rather than by taking part in an in-person ceremony. In this commentary, I argue that Canada should go much f…Read more
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269Property and non-ideal theoryInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1 1-25. 2023.According to the standard story, there are two defensible theories of property rights: historical and institutional theories. The former says that you own something when you’ve received it via an unbroken chain of just transfers from its original appropriation. The latter says that you own something when you’ve been assigned it by just institutions. This standard story says that the historical theory throws up a barrier to redistributive economic policies while the institutional theory does not.…Read more
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305Lucas Swaine, Ethical Autonomy: The Rise of Self-Rule (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5): 543-546. 2022.
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393The ethics of asymmetric politicsPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (1): 3-30. 2023.Polarization often happens asymmetrically. One political actor radicalizes, and the results reverberate through the political system. This is how the deep divisions in contemporary American politics arose: the Republican Party radicalized. Republican officeholders began to use extreme legislative tactics. Republican voters became animated by contempt for their political rivals and by the defense of their own social superiority. The party as a whole launched a wide-ranging campaign of voter suppr…Read more
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1092The Possibility of Democratic AutonomyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 50 (4): 467-498. 2022.What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a c…Read more
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323The Loving StateInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1. 2022.I explore the idea that the state should love its citizens. It should not be indifferent towards them. Nor should it merely respect them. It should love them. We begin by looking at the bases of this idea. First, it can be grounded by a concern with state subordination. The state has enormous power over its citizens. This threatens them with subordination. Love ameliorates this threat. Second, it can be grounded by the state's lack of moral status. We all have reason to love everyone. But we bei…Read more
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511Group agents and moral status: what can we owe to organizations?Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (3). 2021.Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. What explains this? Individualistic views expla…Read more
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363Voter MotivationJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3). 2022.Voters have many motivations. Some vote on the issues. They vote for a candidate because they share that candidate's policy positions. Some vote on performance. They vote for a candidate because they think that candidate will produce the best outcomes in office. Some vote on group identities. They vote for a candidate because that candidate is connected to their social group. This paper is about these motivations. I address three questions. First, which of these motivations, were it widespread, …Read more
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442What Immigrants OweErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (n/a). 2021.Unlike natural-born citizens, many immigrants have agreed to undertake political obligations. Many have sworn oaths of allegiance. Many, when they entered their adopted country, promised to obey the law. This paper is about these agreements. First, it’s about their validity. Do they actually confer political obligations? Second, it’s about their justifiability. Is it permissible to get immigrants to undertake such political obligations? Our answers are ‘usually yes’ and ‘probably not’ respective…Read more
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988Must Egalitarians Condemn Representative Democracy?Social Theory and Practice 1 (1): 171-198. 2021.Many contemporary democratic theorists are democratic egalitarians. They think that the distinctive value of democracy lies in equality. Yet this position faces a serious problem. All contemporary democracies are representative democracies. Such democracies are highly unequal: representatives have much more power than do ordinary citizens. So, it seems that democratic egalitarians must condemn representative democracies. In this paper, I present a solution to this problem. My solution invokes po…Read more
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769Democratic Autonomy and the Shortcomings of CitizensJournal of Moral Philosophy 18 (4). 2020.A widely held picture in political science emphasizes the cognitive shortcomings of us citizens. We’re ignorant. We don’t know much about politics. We’re irrational. We bend the evidence to show our side in the best possible light. And we’re malleable. We let political elites determine our political opinions. This paper is about why these shortcomings matter to democratic values. Some think that democracy’s value consists entirely in its connection to equality. But the import of these shortcomin…Read more
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408On Keeping Things in ProportionJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 16 (3). 2019.Formula One isn’t very important. You can't care about it too much. The refugee crisis is more important. You can care about it much more. In this paper we investigate how important something is. By ‘importance’ we mean how much it is fitting to care about a thing. We explore a view about this which we call Proportionalism. This view says that a thing’s importance depends on that thing’s share of the world’s total value. The more of what matters there is, the less you can care about each thing i…Read more
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398The puzzles of groundPhilosophical Studies 177 (9): 2541-2564. 2020.I outline and provide a solution to some paradoxes of ground.
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461A Simple Proof of Grounding InternalityThought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (3): 154-166. 2019.Some people think that grounding is a type of identity. And some people think that grounding connections hold necessarily. I show that, under plausible assumptions, if grounding is a type of identity, then grounding connections hold necessarily.
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776The logic of groundJournal of Philosophical Logic 49 (1): 13-49. 2020.I explore the logic of ground. I first develop a logic of weak ground. This logic strengthens the logic of weak ground presented by Fine in his ‘Guide to Ground.’ This logic, I argue, generates many plausible principles which Fine’s system leaves out. I then derive from this a logic of strict ground. I argue that there is a strong abductive case for adopting this logic. It’s elegant, parsimonious and explanatorily powerful. Yet, so I suggest, adopting it has important consequences. First, it mea…Read more
London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Value Theory |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |