•  5
    In Defense of (Limited) Oligarchy
    Public Affairs Quarterly 37 (4): 352-370. 2023.
    In democracies around the world, the rich exercise a disproportionate share of political power. Democratic theorists universally condemn this. The current paper brings balance to this conversation by mustering a defense of limited oligarchy. I have two goals. First, I shall argue that we need not be overly despondent about the wealthy's outsized influence, for overrepresentation of the wealthy performs some good for us—good which might not be entirely obvious at first glance. Second, I hope to t…Read more
  •  9
    There is no right to a competent electorate
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    This paper addresses the debate surrounding epistocracy. While many discussions of epistocracy focus on its instrumental defenses, this paper aims to critically examine the non-instrumental jury argument offered by Jason Brennan. Brennan’s argument equates the rights of individuals in political decisions to their rights in jury decisions, asserting that just as individuals have a right to a competent jury, they likewise have a right to a competent electorate. We disagree. By juxtaposing the cost…Read more
  •  42
    Public reason's chaos theorem
    Episteme 16 (2): 200-219. 2019.
    ABSTRACTCitizens in John Rawls's well-ordered society face an assurance dilemma. They wish to act justly only if they are reasonably sure their fellow citizens will also act justly. According to Rawls, this assurance problem is solved through public reasoning. This paper argues that public reason cannot serve this function. It begins by arguing that one kind of incompleteness public reason faces that most Rawlsians grant is ubiquitous but unproblematic from a normative standpoint is problematic …Read more
  •  56
    We Must Always Pursue Economic Growth
    Utilitas 34 (4): 478-492. 2022.
    Why pursue economic growth? For poor countries this is an easy question to answer, but it is more difficult for rich ones. Some of the world's greatest philosophers and economists – such as John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and John Rawls – thought that, once a certain material standard of well-being has been achieved, economic growth should stop. I argue the opposite in this article. We always have reason to pursue economic growth. My argument is indirect. I shall not argue that economic g…Read more
  •  63
    Finding the Epistocrats
    Episteme 20 (2): 497-512. 2023.
    Concerned about widespread incompetence among voters in democratic societies, epistocrats propose quasi-democratic electoral systems that amplify the voices of competent voters while silencing (or perhaps just subduing) the voices of those deemed incompetent. In order to amplify the voices of the competent we first need to know what counts as political competence, and then we need a way of identifying those who possess the relevant characteristics. After developing an account of what it means to…Read more
  •  84
    Reparations to the Privileged?
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (3): 441-455. 2022.
    Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  30
    Lockeans against labor mixing
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 20 (3): 251-272. 2021.
    The idea that labor mixing confers property in unowned resources is, for many, the very heart of the Lockean system of property. In this essay I shall argue that this common view is mistaken. Locke...
  •  16
    Secret Government: The Pathologies of Publicity
    Cambridge University Press. 2021.
    Among politicians and policy-makers it is almost universally assumed that more transparency in government is better. Until now, philosophers have almost completely ignored the topic of transparency, and when it is discussed there seems to be an assumption that increased transparency is a good thing, which results in no serious attempt to justify it. In this book Brian Kogelmann shows that the standard narrative is false and that many arguments in defence of transparency are weak. He offers a com…Read more
  •  28
    Secrecy and transparency in political philosophy
    Philosophy Compass 16 (4). 2021.
    Political institutions can be transparent or secret. If they are transparent, then we have access to information about how agents act within them. If they are secret, then we do not have access to this information. The presence and extent of transparency has tremendous impact on how political institutions function. The purpose of this article is to offer a brief overview of what political philosophers have thus far had to say about transparency as it pertains to political institutions. In doing …Read more
  •  29
    Kant, Rawls, and the Possibility of Autonomy
    Social Theory and Practice 45 (4): 613-635. 2019.
    One feature of John Rawls’s well-ordered society in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism is that citizens in the well-ordered society, when adhering to the principles of justice governing that society, realize their full autonomy. This notion of full autonomy is explicitly Kantian. This constancy, I shall argue, raises problems. Though the model of the well-ordered society presented in TJ is arguably consistent with Kant’s notion of autonomy, the model of the well-ordered society pr…Read more
  •  8
    Rawlsian originalism
    with Alexander William Salter
    Jurisprudence 10 (3): 334-353. 2019.
    ABSTRACTHow should judges reason in a well-ordered constitutional democracy? According to John Rawls’s famous remarks in Political Liberalism, they ought to do so in accordance with the idea of pub...
  •  34
    The supreme court as the Fountain of public reason
    Legal Theory 24 (4): 345-369. 2018.
    ABSTRACTThe idea of public reason requires that citizens in their public deliberation employ considerations stemming from a shared conception of justice. One worry is that public reason's content will be incomplete, in that it does not contain sufficient material for adequate public debate. Rawls has a way of expanding the content of public reason to address such concerns—by including in public reason all those things you and I say in our justification of the conception of justice. After arguing…Read more
  •  513
    Moral Diversity and Moral Responsibility
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (3): 371-389. 2018.
    In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire …Read more
  •  53
    Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements—or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world—obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibi…Read more
  •  40
    Aggregating out of indeterminacy: Social choice theory to the rescue
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (2): 210-232. 2017.
    This article explores public reason liberalism’s indeterminacy problem, a problem that obtains when we admit significant diversity into our justificatory model. The article argues first that Gerald Gaus’s solution to the indeterminacy problem is unsatisfactory and second that, contra Gaus’s concerns, social choice theory is able to solve public reason’s indeterminacy problem. Moreover, social choice theory can do so in a way that avoids the worries raised against Gaus’s solution to the indetermi…Read more
  •  60
    Justice, Diversity, and the Well-Ordered Society
    Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269). 2017.
    One unchanging feature of John Rawls’ thought is that we theorize about well-ordered societies. Yet, once we introduce justice pluralism—the fact that reasonable people disagree about the nature and requirements of justice, something Rawls eventually admits is inevitable in liberal societies—then a well-ordered society as Rawls defines it is impossible. This requires we develop new models of society to replace the well-ordered society in order to adequately address such disagreements. To do so, …Read more
  •  12
    A reality check for the ideal society
    The Philosophers' Magazine 69 51-57. 2015.
  •  73
    The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Pure Libertarianism
    with Stephen G. W. Stich
    Journal of Philosophy 112 (4): 211-222. 2015.
    In “The Impossibility of Pure Libertarianism” Braham and van Hees prove that four conditions on rights—completeness, conclusiveness, non-imposition, and symmetry—cannot be satisfied simultaneously. If Braham and van Hees’s proof is to have any relevance, at least some prominent libertarians must endorse their four conditions, and libertarianism as a philosophical position must in some way be committed to all the axioms. In this paper we demonstrate the irrelevance of Braham and van Hees’s proof …Read more
  •  37
    What we choose, what we prefer
    Synthese 195 (7): 3221-3240. 2018.
    This paper develops an account of what it is that rational agents choose and what it is that rational agents prefer. There are three desiderata to satisfy when offering such an account. First, the account should maintain canonical axioms of rational choice theory as intuitively plausible. Here I focus on contraction and expansion consistency properties. Second, the account should prevent canonical axioms of rational choice theory from becoming trivial—it should be possible to actually violate th…Read more