•  7
    The Multiverse Theodicy Meets Population Ethics
    with Bradford Saad and Bradford Saad*
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    The multiverse theodicy proposes to reconcile the existence of God and evil by supposing that God created all and only the creation-worthy universes and that some universes like ours are, despite their evils, creation-worthy. Drawing on work in population ethics, this paper develops a novel challenge to the multiverse theodicy. Roughly, the challenge contends that the axiological underpinnings of the multiverse theodicy harbor a ‘mere addition paradox’: the assumption that creating creation-wort…Read more
  •  70
    Panpsychism and ensemble explanations
    Philosophical Studies 179 (12): 3583-3597. 2022.
    Panpsychism claims that the vast majority of conscious subjects in our world are inanimate and physical. Ensemble explanations account for striking phenomena by placing them within an ensemble of outcomes, most of which are not striking. This paper develops an explanatory problem for panpsychism: panpsychism renders two appealing ensemble explanations unsatisfactory. Specifically, we argue that panpsychism renders unsatisfactory the multiverse explanation of why a universe supports life and the …Read more
  •  254
    Permissiveness in morality and epistemology
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Morality is intrapersonally permissive: cases abound in which an agent has more than one morally permitted option. In contrast, there is a dearth of cases in which an agent has more than one epistemically permitted response to her evidence. Given the structural parallels between morality and epistemology, why do sources of moral permissiveness fail to have parallel permissive effects in the epistemic domain? This asymmetry between morality and epistemology cries out for explanation. The paper's …Read more
  •  468
    How Supererogation Can Save Intrapersonal Permissivism
    American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2): 171-186. 2019.
    Rationality is intrapersonally permissive just in case there are multiple doxastic states that one agent may be rational in holding at a given time, given some body of evidence. One way for intrapersonal permissivism to be true is if there are epistemic supererogatory beliefs—beliefs that go beyond the call of epistemic duty. Despite this, there has been almost no discussion of epistemic supererogation in the permissivism literature. This paper shows that this is a mistake. It does this by argui…Read more
  •  663
    Conciliationism and merely possible disagreement
    Synthese 193 (9): 1-13. 2016.
    Conciliationism faces a challenge that has not been satisfactorily addressed. There are clear cases of epistemically significant merely possible disagreement, but there are also clear cases where merely possible disagreement is epistemically irrelevant. Conciliationists have not yet accounted for this asymmetry. In this paper, we propose that the asymmetry can be explained by positing a selection constraint on all cases of peer disagreement—whether actual or merely possible. If a peer’s opinion …Read more
  •  769
    Fool me once: Can indifference vindicate induction?
    Episteme 15 (2): 202-208. 2018.
    Roger White (2015) sketches an ingenious new solution to the problem of induction. He argues from the principle of indifference for the conclusion that the world is more likely to be induction- friendly than induction-unfriendly. But there is reason to be skeptical about the proposed indifference-based vindication of induction. It can be shown that, in the crucial test cases White concentrates on, the assumption of indifference renders induction no more accurate than random guessing. After discu…Read more
  •  114
    The trouble with having standards
    Philosophical Studies 176 (5): 1225-1245. 2019.
    The uniqueness thesis states that for any body of evidence and any proposition, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude that an epistemic agent can take toward that proposition. Permissivism is the denial of uniqueness. Perhaps the most popular form of permissivism is what I call the Epistemic Standard View, since it relies on the concept of epistemic standards. Roughly speaking, epistemic standards encode particular ways of responding to any possible body of evidence. Since different ep…Read more
  •  544
    A Theory of Epistemic Supererogation
    Erkenntnis 83 (2): 349-367. 2018.
    Though there is a wide and varied literature on ethical supererogation, there has been almost nothing written about its epistemic counterpart, despite an intuitive analogy between the two fields. This paper seeks to change this state of affairs. I will begin by showing that there are examples which intuitively feature epistemically supererogatory doxastic states. Next, I will present a positive theory of epistemic supererogation that can vindicate our intuitions in these examples, in an explanat…Read more