Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
PhD, 2021
Los Angeles, California, United States
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics
Metaphysics
Areas of Interest
Epistemology
Causation
  •  107
    Making Ethics
    Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2021.
    A window broke and Annie was involved. What’s of moral importance in a situation like this? Not whether Annie caused the window to break and not whether the window wouldn’t have broken if it weren’t for Annie. What’s morally important is whether Annie broke the window. In this thesis, I first generalise and argue for that claim; afterwards, I put it to work in ethics, applied ethics, and legal theory.
  •  251
    Legal causation
    Jurisprudence 14 (1): 55-75. 2022.
    I propose a new formalist account of legal (/proximate) causation – one that holds legal causation to be a matter of amoral, descriptive fact. The account starts with a metaphysical relation, akin to but distinct from common-sense causation, and it argues that legal causation aligns exactly with that relation; it is unified and principled.
  •  375
    Increasing the risk that someone will die without increasing the risk that you will kill them
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2): 395-412. 2022.
    I consider cases where you increase the risk that, e.g., someone will die, without increasing the risk that you will kill them: in particular, cases in which that increasing of risk is accompanied by a decreasing of risk of the same degree such that the risk imposition has been offset. I defend the moral legitimacy of such offsetting, including carbon-offsetting.
  •  529
    MAKING Metaphysics
    Philosophers' Imprint 21 (20). 2021.
    We can cause windows to break and we can break windows; we can cause villages to flood and we can flood villages; and we can cause chocolate to melt and we can melt chocolate. Each time these can come apart: if, for example, A merely instructs B to break the window, then A causes the window to break without breaking it herself. Each instance of A breaking/flooding/melting/burning/killing/etc. something, is an instance of what I call making. I argue that making is an independent, theoretically im…Read more
  •  539
    Might anything be plain good?
    Philosophical Studies 173 (12): 3335-3346. 2016.
    G.E. Moore said that rightness was obviously a matter of maximising plain goodness. Peter Geach and Judith Thomson disagree. They have both argued that ‘good’ is not a predicative adjective, but only ever an attributive adjective: just like ‘big.’ And just as there is no such thing as plain bigness but only ever big for or as a so-and-so, there is also no such thing as plain goodness. They conclude that Moore’s goodness is thus a nonsense. However attention has been drawn to a weakness in their …Read more