•  552
    Doxastic permissiveness and the promise of truth
    Synthese 194 (12): 4897-4912. 2017.
    The purpose of this paper is to challenge what is often called the “Uniqueness” thesis. According to this thesis, given one’s total evidence, there is a unique rational doxastic attitude that one can take to any proposition. It is sensible for defenders of Uniqueness to commit to an accompanying principle that: when some agent A has equal epistemic reason both to believe that p and to believe that not p, the unique epistemically rational doxastic attitude for A to adopt with respect to whether p…Read more
  •  547
    Motivating Reason to Slow the Factive Turn in Epistemology
    In Veli Mitova (ed.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-22. forthcoming.
    In this paper I give a novel argument for the view that epistemic normative reasons (or evidence) need not be facts. I first argue that the nature of normative reasons is uniform, such that our positions about the factivity of reasons should agree across normative realms –– whether epistemic, moral, practical, or otherwise. With that in mind, I proceed in a somewhat indirect way. I argue that if practical motivating reasons are not factive, then practical normative reasons are not factive. If it…Read more
  •  371
    Particularism for Generalists: A Rossian Business Ethic
    Business Ethics Quarterly 31 (4): 600-622. 2021.
    A standard framework for business ethics views the inquiry as an application of major ethical theories to specific issues in business. As these theories are largely presented as being principled, the exercise therefore becomes one of applying general principles to business situations. Many adopting this standard approach have thus resisted the implementation of the most prominent development in ethical theory in recent history: that of particularism. In this article, I argue that particularist t…Read more
  •  284
    Bribery and Business
    Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. 2021.
    The concept of bribery is important to our thinking about ethics, especially in professional contexts. This is in no small part due to the thought that, as Seamus Miller has put it, bribery is “a paradigm of corruption”. Business persons and corporate entities are often evaluated by how well they remain free from, root out, and punish corruption – especially in democratic societies. It is a common thought, for example, that a democratic institution ought to be free from corruption. Since bribery…Read more
  •  21
    How children use drawing to regulate their emotions
    with Ellen Winner
    Cognition and Emotion 27 (3): 512-520. 2013.
  •  12
    Pistor’s Code of Capital: Wealth Inequality and Legalism About Capital
    Journal of Business Ethics 181 (3): 583-588. 2021.
    In The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor seeks to trace out the ultimate sources of wealth and capital. Her central claim—that wealth and capital are ultimately created by law—is at once more commonsensical and intuitive, on the one hand, and more insightful and provocative, on the other hand, than it might initially seem. At a time when there is deep and widespread interest in and concern about wealth inequality, Pistor argues (successfully, I think) that much inequality can be traced back to o…Read more
  •  8
    Frank Drake, “The Father of SETI”, May 28, 1930, to September 2, 2022
    Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (4). 2023.
    Frank Drake was a hero, a legend, an icon. His eponymous Drake Equation was the catalyst forSETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is often called the second most famousequation in physics, right up there with E = mc2. His name is recognized by highschoolstudents—a pantheon that includes names such as Newton, Einstein, Gauss, Maxwell, Planck,Boltzmann.
  •  6
    The impact on human society of new scientific discoveries is generally a quite gradual one, and more evolutionary than revolutionary. At least on the timescales that describe our everydaylives. New physics or chemistry or biotechnology takes industry some time to assimilate, and new products often years to deploy. Today’s top discoveries in astronomy have very littleimpact at all, perhaps piquing the interest of society’s scientific bent for one or two news cycles, perhaps leading to revisions i…Read more
  •  4
    The (ir)relevance of truth to rationality
    Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. 2018.
    It is possible to act for a reason. We do it all the time. You might have brought her medicine for the reason that she is ill. He might go to the store to get milk. Edmund might skate in the middle of the pond because the ice in the middle of the pond is thin. What must be true of us, and of the world, such that we can act for reasons? In normal cases, when someone acts for the reason that the ice in the middle of the pond is thin, it really is the case that the ice in the middle is thin. This i…Read more