•  64
    Equality, Democracy, and the Nature of Status: A Reply to Motchoulski
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (3-4): 311-330. 2023.
    Several contemporary philosophers have argued that democracy earns its moral keep in part by rendering political authority compatible with social or relational equality. In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Motchoulski examines these relational egalitarian defenses of democracy, finds the standard approach wanting, and advances an alternative. The standard approach depends on the claim that inequality of political power constitutes status inequality (the ‘constitutive claim’). Motchoul…Read more
  •  987
    The Possibility of Democratic Autonomy
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 50 (4): 467-498. 2022.
    What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a c…Read more
  •  1456
    Consequences of Comparability
    Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 70-98. 2021.
    We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.
  •  3108
    The Case for Comparability
    Noûs 57 (2): 414-453. 2023.
    We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns of inference that seem manifestly valid, th…Read more