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426Nudges, Nudging, and Self-Guidance Under the InfluenceErgo 9 (44): 1199-1232. 2023.Nudging works through dispositions to decide with specific heuristics, and has three component parts. A nudge is a feature of an environment that enables such a disposition; a person is nudged when such a disposition is triggered; and a person performs a nudged action when such a disposition manifests in action. This analysis clarifies an autonomy-based worry about nudging as used in public policy or for private profit: that a person’s ability to reason well is undermined when she is nudged. Rea…Read more
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459Meaningful Work and Achievement in Increasingly Automated WorkplacesThe Journal of Ethics 28 (3): 527-551. 2024.As automating technologies are increasingly integrated into workplaces, one concern is that many of the human workers who remain will be relegated to more dull and less positively impactful work. This paper considers two rival theories of meaningful work that might be used to evaluate particular implementations of automation. The first is achievementism, which says that work that culminates in achievements to workers’ credit is especially meaningful; the other is the practice view, which says th…Read more
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46Manipulative Design Through GamificationIn Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation, Routledge. pp. 216-234. 2022.Gamification calls for cogent philosophical analysis and is a valuable opportunity to explore manipulative design, in which users are manipulated into doing something by using an artifact just as it is designed to be used. This chapter analyzes gamification as the implementation of inducements to striving play in artifacts that are not themselves games. Implementing such inducements is a species of a more generic form of design in which users are provided with tools for reasoning, along with sca…Read more
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90Meaning in Life and Becoming More FulfilledJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20 (1). 2021.Subjectivism about meaning in life remains a viable option, despite its relative unpopularity. Two arguments against it in the literature, the first by Susan Wolf and the second by Aaron Smuts and Antti Kauppinen, fail. Pace Wolf, lives devoted to activities of no objective value need not be pointless, unproductive, and futile, and so not prima facie meaningless; and, pace Smuts and Kauppinen, subjectivism is compatible with people being mistaken about how meaningful their own lives are. This pa…Read more
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102Nietzsche and the Art of CrueltyJournal of Nietzsche Studies 48 (3): 402-429. 2017.This article explains Nietzsche’s high regard for cruelty. After offering a conceptual analysis of cruel acts, it argues that they are an apt means of expressing one’s power, drawing from work on Nietzsche’s psychological views and doctrine of the will to power to do so. In addition to the benefit that perpetrators of cruelty can enjoy in virtue of expressing their power, victims, by enduring cruelty, can cultivate qualities essential to overcoming the terrible truths of existence. Finally, cent…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Value Theory |
Moral Psychology |
Technology Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Technology |
Practical Reason |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Philosophy of Action |
Practical Reason |
Moral Psychology |