• Segregation and the portfolio theory of identity
    In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
  •  116
    In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence
    Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (2): 211-230. 2020.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  39
    Building Trust for a Better Democracy
    Analysis 82 (3): 552-560. 2022.
    In Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier gives himself the unenviable and yet essential task of diagnosing and responding to the problem of democratic governa.
  •  31
    The meta-wisdom of crowds
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 11051-11074. 2021.
    It is well-known that people will adjust their first-order beliefs based on observations of others. We explore how such adjustments interact with second-order beliefs regarding universalism and relativism in a population. Across a range of simulations, we show that populations where individuals have a tendency toward universalism converge more quickly in coordination problems, and generate higher total payoffs, than do populations where individuals have a tendency toward relativism. Thus, in con…Read more
  •  13
    Norms, Nudges, and Autonomy
    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 (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Springer Verlag. pp. 225-233. 2018.
    Liberal states traditionally rely on a reasonably narrow set of tools for engaging in social regulation. All of these tools are meant to change individual behaviors. Laws come with implicit force, financial regulations come with monetary carrots and sticks, and information provision informs people of the things that policymakers think they should know. Each of these is meant to guide individual choice making by changing how people evaluate their available options. Because this set of tools is me…Read more
  •  40
    Understanding norms and changing them
    Social Philosophy and Policy 35 (1): 128-148. 2018.
  •  38
    Perspectives, norms, and agency
    Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 260-276. 2017.
    A core set of assumptions in economic modeling is that rational agents, who have a defined preference set, assess their options and determine which best satisfies their preferences. The rational actor model supposes that the world provides us with a menu of options, and we simply choose what’s best for us. Agents are independent of one another, and they can rationally assess which of their options they wish to pursue. This gives special authority to the choices that people make, since they are u…Read more
  •  28
    Two views of assistance
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 43 (10): 998-1021. 2017.
    The article makes two substantive contributions to the existing literature on the ethics of international assistance and global justice. First, it builds what we take to be a widely held set of propositions about international assistance into a consistent view, and articulates a strong case against its desirability. Second, it sketches a more attractive alternative. To do so the article uses Sen’s idea of agent-oriented development as a starting point while at the same time providing a generaliz…Read more
  •  125
    On the Emergence of Descriptive Norms
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 13 (1): 3-22. 2014.
    A descriptive norm is a behavioral rule that individuals follow when their empirical expectations of others following the same rule are met. We aim to provide an account of the emergence of descriptive norms by first looking at a simple case, that of the standing ovation. We examine the structure of a standing ovation, and show it can be generalized to describe the emergence of a wide range of descriptive norms
  •  83
    In this work, we present a mathematical model for the emergence of descriptive norms, where the individual decision problem is formalized with the standard Bayesian belief revision machinery. Previous work on the emergence of descriptive norms has relied on heuristic modeling. In this paper we show that with a Bayesian model we can provide a more general picture of the emergence of norms, which helps to motivate the assumptions made in heuristic models. In our model, the priors formalize the bel…Read more
  •  87
    Robust simulations
    Philosophy of Science 74 (5): 873-883. 2007.
    As scientists begin to study increasingly complex questions, many have turned to computer simulation to assist in their inquiry. This methodology has been challenged by both analytic modelers and experimentalists. A primary objection of analytic modelers is that simulations are simply too complicated to perform model verification. From the experimentalist perspective it is that there is no means to demonstrate the reality of simulation. The aim of this paper is to consider objections from both o…Read more
  •  190
    Diversity and the Division of Cognitive Labor
    Philosophy Compass 8 (2): 117-125. 2013.
    In epistemology and the philosophy of science, there has been an increasing interest in the social aspects of belief acquisition. In particular, there has been a focus on the division of cognitive labor in science. This essay explores several different models of the division of cognitive labor, with particular focus on Kitcher, Strevens, Weisberg and Muldoon, and Zollman. The essay then shows how many of the benefits of the division of cognitive labor flow from leveraging agent diversity. The es…Read more
  •  246
    Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to und…Read more
  •  85
    Exploring tradeoffs in accommodating moral diversity
    Philosophical Studies 174 (7): 1871-1883. 2017.
    This paper explores the space of possibilities for public justification in morally diverse communities. Moral diversity is far more consequential than is typically appreciated, and as a result, we need to think more carefully about how our standard tools function in such environments. I argue that because of this diversity, public justification can be divorced from any claim of determinateness. Instead, we should focus our attention on procedures—in particular, what Rawls called cases of pure pr…Read more
  •  99
    The conditions of tolerance
    with Michael Borgida and Michael Cuffaro
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 11 (3): 322-344. 2012.
    The philosophical tradition of liberal political thought has come to see tolerance as a crucial element of a liberal political order. However, while much has been made of the value of toleration, little work has been done on individual-level motivations for tolerant behavior. In this article, we seek to develop an account of the rational motivations for toleration and of where the limits of toleration lie. We first present a very simple model of rational motivations for toleration. Key to this m…Read more
  •  5
    Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to socia…Read more
  •  194
    In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, …Read more
  •  443
    Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor
    Philosophy of Science 76 (2): 225-252. 2009.
    Because of its complexity, contemporary scientific research is almost always tackled by groups of scientists, each of which works in a different part of a given research domain. We believe that understanding scientific progress thus requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. To this end, we present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to climb uphill in this landscape, where…Read more
  •  91
    In On Liberty, Mill introduced the concept of . I will provide an account of what Mill saw to be the basic problem he was addressing – the extensive pressure to fit in with the crowd, and how this bred mediocrity. I connect this to worries about public reason models of justification. I argue that a generalized version of Mill's argument offers us a better path to political justification stemming from experimentation. Rather than grounding political justification on shared political reasons, we j…Read more
  •  170
    Trustworthiness is a social norm, but trusting is not
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 10 (2): 170-187. 2011.
    Previous literature has demonstrated the important role that trust plays in developing and maintaining well-functioning societies. However, if we are to learn how to increase levels of trust in society, we must first understand why people choose to trust others. One potential answer to this is that people view trust as normative: there is a social norm for trusting that imposes punishment for noncompliance. To test this, we report data from a survey with salient rewards to elicit people’s attitu…Read more
  •  88
    Segregation That No One Seeks
    Philosophy of Science 79 (1): 38-62. 2012.
    This paper examines a series of Schelling-like models of residential segregation, in which agents prefer to be in the minority. We demon- strate that as long as agents care about the characteristics of their wider community, they tend to end up in a segregated state. We then investigate the process that causes this, and conclude that the result hinges on the similarity of informational states amongst agents of the same type. This is quite dierent from Schelling-like behavior, and sug- gests (in …Read more