University of Wisconsin, Madison
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2013
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action
Meta-Ethics
  •  386
    The ongoing explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is fueled in part by recently developed techniques in machine learning. Those techniques allow automated systems to process huge amounts of data, utilizing mathematical methods that depart from traditional statistical approaches, and resulting in impressive advancements in our ability to make predictions and uncover correlations across a host of interesting domains. But as is now widely discussed, the way that those systems arrive at t…Read more
  • Embedded EthiCS: Integrating Ethics Across CS Education
    with Barbara J. Grosz, David Gray Grant, Kate Vredenburgh, Lily Hu, Alison Simmons, and Jim Waldo
    Communications of the Acm 62 (8): 54-61. 2019.
    The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are though…Read more
  •  39
    Normative Source and Extensional Adequacy
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10 (3): 1-26. 2016.
    Internalists about practical reasons maintain that all of an agent’s reasons for action derive their normative force via some relation in which they stand with that agent’s pro-attitudes, or the pro-attitudes that the agent would have in some idealized set of circumstances. One common complaint against internalism is that the view is extensionally inadequate – that it cannot render the correct verdicts about what reasons agents have in a range of important cases. In this paper, I examine that ch…Read more
  •  54
    Home Economics for Gender Justice? A Case for Gender-Differentiated Caregiving Education
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3): 551-565. 2017.
    Recent calls for reinstituting mandatory home economics education have emphasized its potential to advance gender egalitarian aims. The thought is that, because women’s disproportionate performance of caregiving and household labor is partially caused by gender socialization that better prepares women than men for such work, we can disrupt gender inegalitarian work distributions by preparing everyone for the sort of work in question. The curricula envisioned in these calls are gender-neutral, in…Read more
  •  71
    Problems and solutions for a hybrid approach to grounding practical normativity
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (2): 159-178. 2015.
    Source Hybridism about practical reasons is the position that facts that constitute reasons sometimes derive their normative force from external metaphysical grounds, and sometimes from internal. Although historically less popular than either Source Internalism or Source Externalism, hybridism has lately begun to garner more attention. Here, I further the hybridist's cause by defending Source Hybridism from three objections. I argue that we are not warranted in rejecting hybridism for any of the…Read more
  •  63
    Enoch, David. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 66 (1): 146-148. 2012.
  •  57
    Probabilistic promotion revisited
    Philosophical Studies 173 (7): 1735-1754. 2016.
    Promotion is the relation between an act and a desire that obtains when the act advances or serves the desire. Under what conditions does an act promote a desire? Probabilistic accounts of promotion, the most prominent accounts, analyze promotion in terms of an increase in the probability of the desire’s satisfaction. In this paper, we clarify the promotion relation and explain why probabilistic accounts are attractive. Then we identify two questions probabilistic accounts must answer: the Basel…Read more
  •  237
    Finlay and Schroeder on Promoting a desire
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (1): 1-7. 2011.
    This paper argues against two prominent accounts of what it is to "promote a desire," found in the work of Stephen Finlay and Mark Schroeder.
  •  79
    Reason to promotion inferences
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2): 1-10. 2015.
    No abstract.
  •  129
    Meta‐normative Realism, Evolution, and Our Reasons to Survive
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4): 486-502. 2013.
    In this article, I articulate and respond to an epistemological challenge to meta-normative realism. The challenge has it that, if realism about the normative is correct, and if evolutionary forces have significantly influenced our normative judgments, then it would be a remarkable coincidence if the content of the normative facts and our normative judgments were aligned. I criticize David Enoch's recent attempt to meet this challenge, but provide an alternative response that is structurally sim…Read more