University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy, St John's College
DPhil, 2015
Bergen, Hordaland, Norway
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics
  •  138
    The Good Life as the Life in Touch with the Good
    Philosophical Studies. forthcoming.
    What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value either when it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are ma…Read more
  •  185
    Commonsense Morality and Contact with Value
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 1-21. 2024.
    There seem to be many kinds of moral duties. We should keep our promises; we should pay our debts of gratitude; we should compensate those we’ve wronged; we should avoid doing or intending harm; we should help those in need. These constitute, some worry, an unconnected heap of duties: the realm of commonsense morality is a disorganized mess. In this paper, we outline a strategy for unifying commonsense moral duties. We argue that they can be understood in terms of contact with value. You are in …Read more
  •  113
    Authenticity, Meaning and Alienation: Reasons to Care Less About Far Future People
    In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    The standard argument for longtermism assumes that we should care as much about far future people as about our contemporaries. I challenge this assumption. I first consider existing interpretations of ‘temporal discounting’, and argue that such discounting seems either unwarranted or insufficient to block the argument. I then offer two alternative reasons to care less about far future people: caring as much about them as about our contemporaries would make our lives less authentic and less meani…Read more
  •  20
    Beyond benefits: gratitude as a response to moral regard
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (10): 1821-1840. 2023.
    What are the fittingness conditions of gratitude? One assumption seems unquestioned in the literature: that whenever it’s fitting for you to be grateful to me, that’s because I’ve benefitted or tried to benefit you. In this paper, I argue that that’s false. You may sometimes fittingly be grateful precisely because I refrained from benefitting you. Or you may be grateful because I omitted to instrumentalise you, or treated you justly – where this isn’t reducible to benefits. Morality isn’t all ab…Read more
  •  173
    Stanley's Three Flaws
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2010.
    In this essay, I shall briefly present Epistemic Contextualism (EC), Invariantism and Interest- Relative Invariantism (IRI) (section 2). Then I will discuss three theses of Jason Stanley’s Knowledge and Practical Interests (Oxford 2005). I argue that Stanley’s case against Contextualism is based on a misconception of its semantic nature, that there is a disadvantage for Interest-Relative Invariantism in terms of the sceptical paradox and that Stanley’s explanation of intuitions can be interprete…Read more
  •  7
    Introduction - Effective Altruism and Religion
    In Dominic Roser, Stefan Riedener & Markus Huppenbauer (eds.), Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue, Nomos. pp. 9-16. 2022.
  • Globale Armut bekämpfen. Und wie?!? Der Effektive Altruismus
    In Bernd Dennemarck, Bernd Goebel & Tobias Hack (eds.), Armut, . pp. 143-169. 2021.
  •  167
    Human Extinction from a Thomist Perspective
    In Stefan Riedener, Dominic Roser & Markus Huppenbauer (eds.), Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue, Nomos. pp. 187-210. 2021.
    “Existential risks” are risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential: risks of nuclear wars, pandemics, supervolcano eruptions, and so on. On standard utilitarianism, it seems, the reduction of such risks should be a key global priority today. Many effective altruists agree with this verdict. But how should the importance of these risks be assessed on a Christian moral theory? In this paper, I begin to answer this question – taking Thomas Aquinas as a reference, and the …Read more
  •  512
    Forgiveness and the Significance of Wrongs
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (1). 2022.
    According to the standard account of forgiveness, you forgive your wrongdoer by overcoming your resentment towards them. But how exactly must you do so? And when is such overcoming fitting? The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel version of the standard account to answer these questions. Its core idea is that the reactive attitudes are a fitting response not just to someone’s blameworthiness, but to their blameworthiness being significant for you, or worthy of your caring, in virtue of you…Read more
  •  2995
    Effective altruism has become a worldwide phenomenon. The movement combines empathy and reason in the attempt to improve the world. Adherents don’t let moral gut instincts dictate their altruistic efforts, but use evidence and reflection to do the most good they can. Effective altruism originated, and primarily grew, in strongly secular environments—such as philosophy departments or Silicon Valley. So far, a religious perspective on this movement has been lacking. What can people of faith learn …Read more
  •  384
    How ought you to evaluate your options if you're uncertain about what's fundamentally valuable? A prominent response is Expected Value Maximisation (EVM)—the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. But the expected value of an option depends on quantitative probability and value facts, and in particular on value comparisons across axiologies. We need to explain what it is for such facts to hold.…Read more
  •  479
    The Point of Promises
    with Philipp Https://Orcidorg Schwind
    Ethics 132 (3): 621-643. 2022.
    The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises,…Read more
  •  411
    Group agents and moral status: what can we owe to organizations?
    with Adam Https://Orcidorg Lovett
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (3). 2021.
    Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. What explains this? Individualistic views expla…Read more
  •  46
    Beyond benefits: gratitude as a response to moral regard
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 2020.
    What are the fittingness conditions of gratitude? One assumption seems unquestioned in the literature: that whenever it’s fitting for you to be grateful to me, that’s because I’ve benefitted or tried to benefit you. In this paper, I argue that that’s false. You may sometimes fittingly be grateful precisely because I refrained from benefitting you. Or you may be grateful because I omitted to instrumentalise you, or treated you justly – where this isn’t reducible to benefits. Morality isn’t all ab…Read more
  •  703
    The topic of this thesis is axiological uncertainty – the question of how you should evaluate your options if you are uncertain about which axiology is true. As an answer, I defend Expected Value Maximisation (EVM), the view that one option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. More precisely, I explore the axiomatic foundations of this view. I employ results from state-dependent utility theory, extend them in various ways and interpret t…Read more
  •  73
    Don’t make a fetish of faults: a vindication of moral luck
    Philosophical Studies 178 (3): 693-711. 2020.
    Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove recklessly but didn’t harm anyone, and Cleo drove recklessly and killed a child. Luck-advocates emphasize that in real life we do blame such agents very unequally. Luck-skeptics counter that people aren’t responsible for factors beyond their control, or beyond their quality of will. I’ll defend a somewhat reconciliatory view. I’ll co…Read more
  •  318
    On Keeping Things in Proportion
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 16 (3). 2019.
    Formula One isn’t very important. You can't care about it too much. The refugee crisis is more important. You can care about it much more. In this paper we investigate how important something is. By ‘importance’ we mean how much it is fitting to care about a thing. We explore a view about this which we call Proportionalism. This view says that a thing’s importance depends on that thing’s share of the world’s total value. The more of what matters there is, the less you can care about each thing i…Read more
  •  126
    The Standing To Blame, or Why Moral Disapproval Is What It Is
    Dialectica 73 (1-2): 183-210. 2019.
    Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In…Read more
  •  59
    Constructivism about Intertheoretic Comparisons
    Utilitas 31 (3): 277-290. 2019.
    Many people think that if you're uncertain about which moral theory is correct, you ought to maximize the expected choice-worthiness of your actions. This idea presupposes that the strengths of our moral reasons are comparable across theories – for instance, that our reasons to create new people, according to total utilitarianism, can be stronger than our reasons to benefit an existing person, according to a person-affecting view. But how can we make sense of such comparisons? In this article, I…Read more
  •  124
    An axiomatic approach to axiological uncertainty
    Philosophical Studies 177 (2): 483-504. 2020.
    How ought you to evaluate your options if you’re uncertain about which axiology is true? One prominent response is Expected Moral Value Maximisation, the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected moral value across axiologies. EMVM raises two fundamental questions. First, there’s a question about what it should even mean. In particular, it presupposes that we can compare moral value across axiologies. So to even understan…Read more