•  517
    Debunking creedal beliefs
    Synthese 200 (6): 1-18. 2022.
    Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal belie…Read more
  •  10
    Aaron Smuts, Welfare, Meaning, and Worth
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5): 535-538. 2022.
  •  1387
    The Epistemic Significance of Social Pressure
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (4): 396-410. 2022.
    This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one’s belief that P—the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P because it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core strand of argument in Mill’s On Liberty. A consequence of the argument is that on morally and pol…Read more
  •  555
    Can we outsource all the reasons?
    Philosophical Studies (12): 1-16. 2022.
    Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agent has reason to do obtain? On one class of views, reason facts obtain in virtue of agents’ motivations. It might seem like a truism that at least some of our reasons depend on what we desire or care about. However, some philosophers, notably Derek Parfit, have convincingly argued that no reasons are grounded in this way. Typically, this latter, externalist view of reasons has been thought to enjoy th…Read more
  •  155
    Welfare, Meaning, and Worth (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy. forthcoming.
  •  3347
    Political protests, debates on college campuses, and social media tirades make it seem like everyone is speaking their minds today. Surveys, however, reveal that many people increasingly feel like they're walking on eggshells when communicating in public. Speaking your mind can risk relationships and professional opportunities. It can alienate friends and anger colleagues. Isn't it smarter to just put your head down and keep quiet about controversial topics? In this book, Hrishikesh Joshi offers…Read more
  •  23
    Knowing Our Limits
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 438-440. 2021.
    Knowing Our Limits. By Ballantyne Nathan.
  •  370
    Immigration
    In Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism, Routledge. 2022.
    Within the immigration debate, libertarians have typically come down in favor of open borders by defending two main ideas: i) individuals have a right to free movement; and ii) immigration restrictions are economically inefficient, so that lifting them can make everyone better off. This entry describes the rationale for open borders from a libertarian perspective (in part by analogy to the debate around minimum wage laws). Three main objections within the immigration literature are then discusse…Read more
  •  14
    Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants
    In David Boonin, Katrina L. Sifferd, Tyler K. Fagan, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Michael Huemer, Daniel Wodak, Derk Pereboom, Stephen J. Morse, Sarah Tyson, Mark Zelcer, Garrett VanPelt, Devin Casey, Philip E. Devine, David K. Chan, Maarten Boudry, Christopher Freiman, Hrishikesh Joshi, Shelley Wilcox, Jason Brennan, Eric Wiland, Ryan Muldoon, Mark Alfano, Philip Robichaud, Kevin Timpe, David Livingstone Smith, Francis J. Beckwith, Dan Hooley, Russell Blackford, John Corvino, Corey McCall, Dan Demetriou, Ajume Wingo, Michael Shermer, Ole Martin Moen, Aksel Braanen Sterri, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Jeppe von Platz, John Thrasher, Mary Hawkesworth, William MacAskill, Daniel Halliday, Janine O’Flynn, Yoaav Isaacs, Jason Iuliano, Claire Pickard, Arvin M. Gouw, Tina Rulli, Justin Caouette, Allen Habib, Brian D. Earp, Andrew Vierra, Subrena E. Smith, Danielle M. Wenner, Lisa Diependaele, Sigrid Sterckx, G. Owen Schaefer, Markus K. Labude, Harisan Unais Nasir, Udo Schuklenk, Benjamin Zolf & Woolwine (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Springer Verlag. pp. 173-184. 2018.
    This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to minimize the occurrence of unauthorized migration and stay. While the effects of unauthorized migration on a country’s citizens and institutions have been vigorously debated, the literature has largely ignored duties of fairness to would-be immigrants. It is argued here that failing to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized migration and stay is deeply unfair to would-be immigrants who are no…Read more
  •  3171
    The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other si…Read more
  •  456
    What’s Personhood Got to Do with it?
    Philosophia 48 (2): 557-571. 2020.
    Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to both. Would such a system be just? Theodore Sider argues: no. For, any possible criterion of determining where people go will involve treating very similar individuals very differently. Here, I argue that this point has deep and underappreciated implications for moral philosophy. The argument proceeds by analogy: many ethical theories make a sharp and practically significant distinction between pers…Read more
  •  1491
    Why Not Socialism
    Public Affairs Quarterly 33 (3): 243-264. 2019.
    According to G.A. Cohen, the principles of justice are insensitive to facts about human moral limitations. This assumption allows him to mount a powerful defense of socialism. Here, I present a dilemma for Cohen. On the one hand, if such socialism is to be realized through collective property ownership, then the information problem renders the ideal incoherent, not merely infeasible. On the other hand, if socialism is to incorporate private ownership of productive assets, then Cohen loses the re…Read more
  •  45
    Is Liberalism Committed to Its Own Demise?
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 13 (3). 2018.
    Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Freiman and Hidalgo have argued that immigration restrictions conflict with the core commitments of liberalism. A society with immigration restrictions in place may well be optimal in some desired respects, but it is not liberal, they argue. So if you care about liberalism more deeply than you care about immigration restrictions, you should give up on restrictionism. You can’t hold on to both. I argue here that many restrictions …Read more
  •  636
    This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to minimize the occurrence of unauthorized migration and stay. While the effects of unauthorized migration on a country’s citizens and institutions have been vigorously debated, the literature has largely ignored duties of fairness to would-be immigrants. It is argued here that failing to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized migration and stay is deeply unfair to would-be immigrants who are no…Read more
  •  2496
    According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move around the globe and settle as they wish, with exceptions made only in very specific cases such as fugitives or terrorists. Defenders of open borders have adopted two major argumentative strategies. The first is to claim that immigration restrictions involve coercion, and then show that such coercion cannot be morally justified. The second is to argue that adopting worldwide open borders policies wou…Read more
  •  46
    What’s the matter with Huck Finn?
    Philosophical Explorations 20 (1): 70-87. 2017.
    This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you believe you ought not to do. I suggest that there is a prima facie tension between this idea and certain plausible coherence constraints on rational agency. I propose a way to resolve this tension. While akratic agents are always irrational, they are not always practically irrational, as many authors assume. Rather, “inverse” akratics like Huck Finn fail in a distinctively theoretical way. What explains w…Read more