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16A Theory of Subjective Well-Being, Mark Fabian. Oxford University Press, 2022, x + 305 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 39 (3): 528-532. 2023.
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274Procedural Fairness in Exchange Matching SystemsJournal of Business Ethics 188 (2): 367-377. 2022.The move from open outcry to electronic trading added another responsibility to futures exchanges—that of matching orders between buyers and sellers. Matching systems can affect the level and speed of price discovery, the distribution of revenue, as well as the level of price efficiency of a given market. Whether the matching system is procedurally fair is another important consideration. I argue that while FIFO (First In First Out) is a fair procedure in principle and is perceived as the defaul…Read more
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659When is Green Nudging Ethically Permissible?Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 60 (n/a): 101236. 2023.This review article provides a new perspective on the ethics of green nudging. We advance a new model for assessing the ethical permissibility of green nudges (GNs). On this model, which provides normative guidance for policymakers, a GN is ethically permissible when the intervention is (1) efficacious, (2) cost-effective, and (3) the advantages of the GN (i.e. reducing the environmental harm) are not outweighed by countervailing costs/harms (i.e. for nudgees). While traditional ethical objectio…Read more
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520The usefulness of well-being temporalismJournal of Economic Methodology 30 (4): 322-336. 2022.It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public pol…Read more
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374A new well‐being atomismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1): 3-23. 2022.Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the pruden…Read more
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24Law for Sale: A Philosophical Critique of Regulatory Competition, by Johanna Stark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 210 pp (review)Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (3): 433-436. 2020.
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779You Can Bluff but You Should Not SpoofBusiness and Professional Ethics Journal 39 (2): 207-224. 2020.Spoofing is the act of placing orders to buy or sell a financial contract without the intention to have those orders fulfilled in order to create the impression that there is a large demand for that contract at that price. In this article, I deny the view that spoofing in financial markets should be viewed as morally permissible analogously to the way bluffing is permissible in poker. I argue for the pro tanto moral impermissibility of spoofing and make the case that spoofing is disanalogous fro…Read more
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524Well-Being CoherentismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (4): 1045-1065. 2022.Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually before measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we me…Read more
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1364The Need for Governmental Inefficiency in Plato’s RepublicJournal of History of Economic Thought 43 (1). 2021.In book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates discusses the cities of necessity and luxury (372d-373a). Discussions of these cities have often focused on citizens desiring more than they need, which creates a demand for luxury. Yet the second part of the equation, which is not usually recognized, is that there must be sufficient supply to meet this demand. The focus of this article is on the importance of supply in the discussion of the first two cities in book II of the Republic. This article a…Read more
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572No Theory-Free Lunches in Well-Being PolicyPhilosophical Quarterly 70 (278): 43-64. 2020.Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-be…Read more
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300From Models to ExperimentsIn Richard E. Wagner (ed.), James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 921-937. 2018.In this paper we discuss James Buchanan’s contribution in the narrow domain of understanding committee voting under majority rule. We then go on to discuss Charles Plott’s seminal experimental work on the topic that sparked a wave of public choice experimental work. However, given Plott’s claims that Buchanan influenced him significantly, it is puzzling that his work with Morris Fiorina explores a question outside of those which Buchanan and Tullock found interesting. We suggest several ways to …Read more
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230The Irrelevance of Unsuccessful TradersBusiness Ethics Journal Review 6 (8): 41-46. 2018.Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral virtues are antithetical to what is required of those who trade in financial markets to succeed. MacIntyre focuses on four virtues and argues that successful traders possess none of them: (i) self-knowledge, (ii) courage, (iii) taking a long-term perspective, and (iv) tying one’s own good with some set of common goods. By contrast, I argue that (i)–(iii) are, in fact, traits of successful traders, regardless of their normative assessment. The last trait – ca…Read more
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18Ignoring Easterlin; Why Easterlin’s Correlation Findings Need Not Matter to Public PolicyJournal of Happiness Studies 19 (8): 2225-2241. 2018.Many believe that the lack of correlation between happiness and income, first discovered by Richard Easterlin in 1974, entails the conclusion that well-being policies should be made based on happiness measures, rather than income measures. I argue that distinguishing between how well-being is characterized and how that characterization is measured introduces ways of denying the conclusion that policies should be made based on happiness measures. It is possible to avoid the conclusion either by d…Read more
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318Educational Equipoise and the Educational Misconception; Lessons from BioethicsTeaching and Learning Inquirey 6 (2): 3-15. 2018.Some advances in bioethics regarding ethical considerations that arise in the context of medical research can also be relevant when thinking about the ethical considerations that arise in the context of SoTL research. In this article, I aim to bring awareness to two potential ethical challenges SoTL researchers might face when playing a dual role of teacher and researcher that are similar to the challenges physicians face in their dual role of physician and researcher. In this article, I argue t…Read more
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323The Narrowed Domain of Disagreement for Well-Being PolicyPublic Affairs Quarterly 32 (1): 1-19. 2018.in recent years, policy makers have shown increasing interest in implementing policies aimed at promoting individual well-being. But how should policy makers choose their well-being policies? a seemingly reasonable first step is to settle on an agreed-upon definition of well-being. yet there currently is significant disagreement on how well-being ought to be characterized, and agreement on the correct view of well-being does not appear to be forthcoming. Nevertheless, i argue in this paper that …Read more
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528Can an evidential account justify relying on preferences for well-being policy?Journal of Economic Methodology 22 (3): 280-291. 2015.Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. T…Read more
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510Experimental economics' inconsistent ban on deceptionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 52 13-19. 2015.According to what I call the ‘argument from public bads’, if a researcher deceived subjects in the past, there is a chance that subjects will discount the information that a subsequent researcher provides, thus compromising the validity of the subsequent researcher’s experiment. While this argument is taken to justify an existing informal ban on explicit deception in experimental economics, it can also apply to implicit deception, yet implicit deception is not banned and is sometimes used in exp…Read more
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Virginia TechDepartment of Philosophy
Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and EconomicsAssociate Professor
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Philosophy of Economics |
Business Ethics |