•  78
    Regulating Speech: Harm, Norms, and Discrimination
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Mary Kate McGowan’s Just Words offers an interesting account of exercitives. On McGowan’s view, one of the things we do with words is change what’s permitted, and we do this ubiquitously, without any special authority or specific intention. McGowan’s account of exercitives is meant to identify a mechanism by which ordinary speech is harmful, and which justifies the regulation of such speech. It is here that I part ways. I make three main a…Read more
  •  118
    People’s Beliefs About Pronouns Reflect Both the Language They Speak and Their Ideologies
    with April Bailey, Robin Dembroff, Elif Ikizer, and Andrei Cimpian
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. forthcoming.
    Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across…Read more
  •  47
    Which Majority Should Rule?
    Philosophy and Public Affairs. forthcoming.
    Majority rule is often regarded as an important democratic principle. But modern democracies divide voters into districts. So if the majority should rule, which majority should rule? Should it be the popular majority, or an electoral majority (i.e., either the majority of voters in the majority of districts, or the majority of voters in districts that contain the majority of the population)? I argue that majority rule requires rule by the popular majority. This view is not novel and may seem obv…Read more
  •  48
    We argued that formal objections to the error theory overgeneralize and therefore fail. Christine Tiefensee and Gregory Wheeler deny this. We argue that they are wrong, for two reasons. The first concerns how we should adjudicate conflicts between formal and substantive commitments. The second concerns an overlooked tension between formal objections and non-error-theoretic views. Our discussion shows that the commitments behind formal objections to the error theory, such as the dual schema, shou…Read more
  •  604
    Does Race Best Explain Racial Discrimination?
    Philosophers' Imprint 23. 2023.
    Our concern in this paper lies with a common argument from racial discrimination to realism about races: some people are discriminated against for being members of a particular race (i.e., racial discrimination exists), so some people must be members of that race (i.e., races exist). Error theorists have long responded that we can explain racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, so we need not explain it in terms of race itself. But to date there has been little detailed discuss…Read more
  • The Perversity of Weighted Voting
    Journal of Politics. forthcoming.
    Weighted voting involves weighting representatives’ votes by the populations that they represent. Such systems have been adopted in some legislative bodies as a remedy for malapportionment, and are sometimes used to elect candidates for the executive branch of government. But they receive little attention. This note observes the neglected vices of weighted voting systems: they violate intuitive conditions of monotonicity and participation. These vices count significantly against the use of weigh…Read more
  •  158
    The Disunity of Legal Reality
    Legal Theory 28 (3): 235-267. 2022.
    Take “legal reality” to be the part of reality that actual legal thought and talk is dis- tinctively about, such as legal institutions, legal obligations, and legal norms. Our goal is to explore whether legal reality is disunified. To illustrate the issue, consider the possibility that an important metaphysical thesis such as positivism is true of one part of legal reality (legal institutions), but not another (legal norms). We offer two arguments that suggest that legal reality is disunified: o…Read more
  •  198
    The Democratic Imperative to Make Margins Matter
    Maryland Law Review. forthcoming.
    Many commentators lament that American democracy is in crisis. It is becoming a system of minority rule, wherein a party with a minority of the nationwide vote can control the national government. Partisan gerrymandering in the House of Representatives fuels this crisis, as does the equal representation of small and large states in the Senate. But altering these features of the legislature would not end minority rule. Indeed, it has long been held that majority rule cannot be guaranteed within a…Read more
  •  988
    Of Witches and White Folks
    Wiley: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3): 587-605. 2021.
    A central debate in philosophy of race is between eliminativists and conservationists about what we ought do with ‘race’ talk. ‘Eliminativism’ is often defined such that it’s committed to holding that (a) ‘race’ is vacuous and races don’t exist, so (b) we should eliminate the term ‘race’ from our vocabulary. As a stipulative definition, that’s fine. But as an account of one of the main theoretical options in the debate, it’s a serious mistake. I offer three arguments for why eliminativism should…Read more
  •  31
    Legal Positivism and the Real Definition of Law
    Jurisprudence 13 (3): 317-348. 2022.
    We explore an underappreciated tension at the heart of the debate over legal positivism. On the one hand, many legal philosophers aspire for the debate to tell us what law is, and the nature of law. But on the other hand, the positions in the debate are generally formulated such that they’re about something else: what law is necessarily connected to or dependent on. This is a genuine tension, because theses about what law is necessarily connected to or dependent on do not by themselves state or …Read more
  •  201
    On the (in)significance of Hume’s Law
    Philosophical Studies 179 (2): 633-653. 2022.
    Hume’s Law that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” has often been deemed to bear a significance that extends far beyond logic. Repeatedly, it has been invoked as posing a serious threat to views about normativity: naturalism in metaethics and positivism in jurisprudence. Yet in recent years, a puzzling asymmetry has emerged: while the view that Hume’s Law threatens naturalism has largely been abandoned (due mostly to Pigden’s work, see e.g. Pigden 1989), the thought that Hume’s Law is a s…Read more
  •  307
    Approving on the Basis of Moral and Aesthetic Testimony
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics. forthcoming.
    If a reliable testifier tells you that a song is beautiful or that an act is wrong, do you thereby have a reason to approve of the painting and disapprove of the agent's action? Many insist that we don’t: normative testimony does not give us reasons for affective attitudes like approval. This answer is often treated as a datum in the literatures on moral and aesthetic testimony. I argue that once we correct for a common methodological mistake in these literatures, the answer must be Yes. I then …Read more
  •  127
    Why formal objections to the error theory fail
    Analysis 81 (2): 254-262. 2021.
    Many philosophers argue that the error theory should be rejected because it is incompatible with standard deontic logic and semantics. We argue that such formal objections to the theory fail. Our discussion has two upshots. First, it increases the dialectical weight that must be borne by objections to the error theory that target its content rather than its form. Second, it shows that standard deontic logic and semantics should be revised.
  •  456
    Who’s on first
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 15. 2020.
    “X-Firsters” hold that there is some normative feature that is fundamental to all others (and, often, that there’s some normative feature that is the “mark of the normative”: all other normative properties have it, and are normative in virtue of having it). This view is taken as a starting point in the debate about which X is “on first.” Little has been said about whether or why we should be X-Firsters, or what we should think about normativity if we aren’t X-Firsters. Hence the chapter’s …Read more
  •  2598
    How Much Gender is Too Much Gender?
    In Justin Khoo & Rachel Katharine Sterken (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 362-376. 2021.
    We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific…Read more
  •  319
    Redundant Reasons
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2): 266-278. 2020.
    It is commonly held that p is a reason for A to ϕ only if p explains why A ought to ϕ. I argue that this view must be rejected because there are reasons for A to ϕ that would be redundant in any ex...
  •  637
    An Objectivist’s Guide to Subjective Reasons
    Res Philosophica 96 (2): 229-244. 2019.
    The distinction between objective and subjective reasons plays an important role in both folk normative thought and many research programs in metaethics. But the relation between objective and subjective reasons is unclear. This paper explores problems related to the unity of objective and subjective reasons for actions and attitudes and then offers a novel objectivist account of subjective reasons.
  •  406
    Resolving Judicial Dilemmas
    Virginia Journal of Criminal Law 6 93-181. 2018.
    The legal reasons that bind a judge and the moral reasons that bind all persons can sometimes pull in different directions. There is perhaps no starker example of such judicial dilemmas than in criminal sentencing. Particularly where mandatory minimum sentences are triggered, a judge can be forced to impose sentences that even the judge regards as “immensely cruel, if not barbaric.” Beyond those directly harmed by overly harsh laws, some courts have recognized that “judges who, forced to partici…Read more
  •  463
    Expressivism and Varieties of Normativity
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12 265-293. 2017.
    The expressivist advances a view about how we explain the meaning of a fragment of language, such as claims about what we morally ought to do. Critics evaluate expressivism on those terms. This is a serious mistake. We don’t just use that fragment of language in isolation. We make claims about what we morally, legally, rationally, and prudentially ought to do. To account for this linguistic phenomenon, the expressivist owes us an account not just of each fragment of language, but of how they wea…Read more
  •  633
    The Expressive Case against Plurality Rule
    Journal of Political Philosophy 27 (3): 363-387. 2019.
    The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule…Read more
  •  682
    What If Well-Being Measurements Are Non-Linear?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 29-45. 2019.
    Well-being measurements are frequently used to support conclusions about a range of philosophically important issues. This is a problem, because we know too little about the intervals of the relevant scales. I argue that it is plausible that well-being measurements are non-linear, and that common beliefs that they are linear are not truth-tracking, so we are not justified in believing that well-being scales are linear. I then argue that this undermines common appeals to both hypothetical and act…Read more
  •  9414
    He/She/They/Ze
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5. 2018.
    In this paper, we defend two main claims. The first is a moderate claim: we have a negative duty to not use binary gender-specific pronouns he or she to refer to genderqueer individuals. We defend this with an argument by analogy. It was gravely wrong for Mark Latham to refer to Catherine McGregor, a transgender woman, using the pronoun he; we argue that such cases of misgendering are morally analogous to referring to Angel Haze, who identifies as genderqueer, as he or she. The second is a radi…Read more
  •  1550
    Mandatory Minimums and the War on Drugs
    In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 51-62. 2018.
    Mandatory minimum sentencing provisions have been a feature of the U.S. justice system since 1790. But they have expanded considerably under the war on drugs, and their use has expanded considerably under the Trump Administration; some states are also poised to expand drug-related mandatory minimums further in efforts to fight the current opioid epidemic. In this paper I outline and evaluate three prominent arguments for and against the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs—they appeal, …Read more
  •  937
    Moral perception, inference, and intuition
    Philosophical Studies 176 (6): 1495-1512. 2019.
    Sarah McGrath argues that moral perception has an advantage over its rivals in its ability to explain ordinary moral knowledge. I disagree. After clarifying what the moral perceptualist is and is not committed to, I argue that rival views are both more numerous and more plausible than McGrath suggests: specifically, I argue that inferentialism can be defended against McGrath’s objections; if her arguments against inferentialism succeed, we should accept a different rival that she neglects, intui…Read more
  •  742
    Mere formalities: fictional normativity and normative authority
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (6): 1-23. 2019.
    It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should…Read more
  •  1057
    What Does ‘Legal Obligation’ Mean?
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4): 790-816. 2018.
    What do normative terms like “obligation” mean in legal contexts? On one view, which H.L.A. Hart may have endorsed, “obligation” is ambiguous in moral and legal contexts. On another, which is dominant in jurisprudence, “obligation” has a distinctively moralized meaning in legal contexts. On a third view, which is often endorsed in philosophy of language, “obligation” has a generic meaning in moral and legal con- texts. After making the nature of and disagreements between these views precise, I s…Read more
  •  372
    Can Objectivists Account for Subjective Reasons?
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (3): 259-279. 2017.
    I argue that existing objectivist accounts of subjective reasons face systematic problems with cases involving probability and possibility. I then offer a diagnosis of why objectivists face these problems, and recommend that objectivists seek to provide indirect analyses of subjective reasons.