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54Consensus, Convergence, and Covid-19: The Role of Religion in Leaders’ Responses to Covid-19Leadership 13 (3): 446-64. 2023.Focusing on current efforts to persuade the public to comply with Covid-19 best practices, this essay examines what role appeals to religious reasons should (or should not) play in leaders’ attempts to secure followers’ acceptance of group policies in contexts of religious and moral pluralism. While appeals to followers’ religious commitments can be helpful in promoting desirable public health outcomes, they also raise moral concerns when made in the contexts of secular institutions with religio…Read more
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100The Problem of Evil and the Pauline Principle: Consent, Logical Constraints, and Free WillReligions 14 (1): 1-15. 2023.James Sterba uses the Pauline Principle to argue that the occurrence of significant, horrendous evils is logically incompatible with the existence of a good God. The Pauline Principle states that (as a rule) one must never do evil so that good may come from it, and according to Sterba, this principle implies that God may not permit significant evils even if that permission would be necessary to secure other, greater goods. By contrast, I argue that the occurrence of significant evils is lo…Read more
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98The Phenomenal Appreciation of ReasonsIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 15, Oxford University Press. pp. 24-48. 2020.Huckleberry Finn believes that by helping Miss Watson’s slave Jim escape to freedom, he is doing something wrong. But Huck does it anyway—and many want to give him moral credit for this choice. If Huck is to be worthy of such moral esteem, however, it seems there must be some implicit way of appreciating and responding to considerations as moral reasons that does not involve explicitly believing that those considerations are moral reasons. This chapter argues that an agent like Huck can implicit…Read more
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174The problem of arbitrary requirements: an Abrahamic perspectiveInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (3): 221-242. 2020.Some religious requirements seem genuinely arbitrary in the sense that there seem to be no sufficient explanation of why those requirements with those contents should pertain. This paper aims to understand exactly what it might mean for a religious requirement to be genuinely arbitrary and to discern whether and how a religious practitioner could ever be rational in obeying such a requirement. We lay out four accounts of what such arbitrariness could consist in, and show how each account provide…Read more
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19On the reasonability of reasoning with the religiously unreasonableCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. forthcoming.Political liberals argue that religious citizens should exercise religious restraint: they ought, at least as a rule, not to rely directly on religious reasons in public political debates, and should instead draw only from the contents of a ‘reasonable’, secular political conception of justice. Political liberals hold that direct religious reasoners’ who fail to follow this rule fail to be ‘reasonable’ (in a technical sense) and contend that liberal polities may thus dismiss their religiously-mo…Read more
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16Against insular liberalism: Sayyid Qutb, illiberal Islam and the forceless force of the better argumentPhilosophy and Social Criticism. forthcoming.Political liberals claim that liberal polities may legitimately dismiss the objections of ‘unreasonable’ citizens who resist political liberals’ favored principles of justice and political justification. A growing number of other political philosophers, including post-colonialist theorists, have objected to the resulting insularity of political liberalism. However, political liberals’ insularity also often prevents them from being sensitive or responsive to these critics’ complaints. In this art…Read more
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19The Moral Duty Against DogmatismThe Journal of Ethics 26 (4): 563-589. 2022.In this paper, I argue for a _(pro tanto)_ _moral duty against dogmatism_: I argue that the _social costs_ of a disagreement can give those who are party to it added moral reasons to reconsider their controversial beliefs and (so) not to be dogmatic. In Sect. 1, I motivate the idea _that_ the social costs of disagreement may give rise to reasons to reconsider our beliefs by considering intuitive examples to that effect. I suggest that some of the stock intuitions that epistemologists of disagree…Read more
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23Between Mysticism and Philosophical Rationality: Al-Ghazālī on the Reasons of the HeartComparative Philosophy 12 (2). 2021.In his seminal Orientalism and Religion, Richard King argues that Western scholars of religion have constructed a conceptual dichotomy between “mysticism” and “rationality” that has caused them to systematically distort the claims and arguments of Eastern thinkers. While King focuses primarily on Western scholarship on the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, this essay shows that his argument can also be extended to apply to Western scholarship on al-Ghazālī, whose sympathy for Sufism and apparent re…Read more
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Rutgers - New BrunswickDoctoral student
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Hope CollegeRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Moral Psychology |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Philosophy of Mind |