My research statement is here. My Google Scholar page can be found here. My PhilPeople page is here. Drafts of some old papers can be found on my academia.edu page here, but I generally don't use it anymore. My publications are also listed on my CV, along with several works in progress. My coauthored book with Matt Lutz, Is Morality Real? A Debate, is available for purchase via Routledge here. Below is a list of publications with links to those that are open access, and penultimate drafts of others.
Published academic articles
"Holocaust perpetrators and Unjust combatants," Journal of Controversial Ideas, 2024, 4(2) (forthcoming)
There are compelling reasons to accept Revisionism in just war theory, the view, roughly, that combatants fighting on the unjust side of a war have no moral right to kill combatants fighting on the just side. This seems to imply that participating in an unjust war as an ordinary soldier is gravely immoral. Indeed, it’s hard to see why such soldiers aren’t the moral peers of the low-level Holocaust perpetrators who have been found guilty of many counts of aiding and abetting murder. This paper explores the implications of Revisionism for the moral culpability and blameworthiness of unjust combatants. I argue that (i) some unjust combatants who respect the rules of war are as culpable, and may be just as blameworthy, as low-level Holocaust perpetrators; however, (ii) there remain good grounds for thinking that such perpetrators are often more blameworthy than ordinary unjust combatants even if Revisionism is true.
"The Limits of Identity: Running Tuvel's Argument the Other Way," Journal of Controversial Ideas, 2022, 2(2). Link here.
Rebecca Tuvel provoked a firestorm by arguing that since we should accept trans* self-identification, we should accept transracial identification as well. This paper defends Tuvel’s conditional claim (if trans* acceptance, then transracial acceptance) but draws a different conclusion. I argue that reasoning similar to Tuvel’s establishes that people who identify as something other than human, and people who identify as physically disabled though their bodies aren’t impaired, plausibly also deserve recognition. This reductio ad absurdum of her reasoning should lead us to doubt whether we must embrace trans* self-identification as fully as self-described trans* allies claim that we must. This shouldn’t be construed to mean that trans* people, or members of any of these other groups, deserve anything less than respectful treatment and compassion as moral persons.
"Moral Extremism," Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2021, 38(4): 615-629. Link here.
The word “extremist” is often used pejoratively, but it’s not clear what, if anything, is wrong with extremism. My project is to give an account of moral extremism as a vice. It consists roughly in having moral convictions so intense that they cause a sort of moral tunnel vision, pushing salient competing considerations out of mind. We should be interested in moral extremism for several reasons: it’s consequential, it’s insidious –we don’t expect immorality to arise from excessive devotion to morality – and it’s yet to attract much philosophical attention. I give several examples of moral extremism from history and explore their social-political implications. I also consider how we should evaluate people who miss the mark, being either too extreme in the service of a good cause, or inconsistent with their righteous convictions. I compare John Brown and John Quincy Adams, who fell on either side of this spectrum, as examples.
"Small Evils and Live Options: A New Strategy Against the Argument from Evil," Philosophia Christi, 2020, 22(2): 307-321. Link here.
Many philosophers have thought that aggregates of small, broadly dispersed evils don’t pose the same sort of challenge to theism that horrendous evils like the Nazi Holocaust do. But there are interesting arguments that purport to show that large enough aggregates of small evils are morally and axiologically equivalent to horrendous evils. Herein lies an intriguing and overlooked strategy for defending theism. In short: small evils, or aggregates of such evils, don’t provide decisive evidence against theism; there’s no relevant difference between horrendous evils and aggregates of small evils; hence horrendous evils must not provide decisive evidence against theism, either.
"Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice," Philosophia, 2020, 49(1): 197-216. Link to penultimate draft here.
Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have focused on epistemic injustices involving certain social categories, particularly race and gender. Can there be epistemic injustice attached to political conviction and affiliation? I argue yes: politics can be a salient social category that draws epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices might also be intersectional, based on the overlap of politics and some other identity category like race or sex. Further, and more provocatively, I argue that political minorities in academia, in particular conservatives and libertarians, are most likely the victims of epistemic injustice on the basis of their politics. Such epistemic injustices might even be routine. Although more limited in scope and severity than other forms of epistemic injustice, political epistemic injustices in academia ought to be of special concern from a standpoint of social justice because of the academy’s central role in knowledge production and dissemination.
"The Normative Error Theorist Cannot Avoid Self-Defeat," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2020, 98(1): 92-104. Link here.
Many philosophers have noted that normative error theorists appear to be committed to saying ‘Error theory is true, but I have no reason to believe it’, which seems paradoxical. In defense of error theory, some have claimed that the word ‘reason’ in that statement is ambiguous between ‘normative reason’ and a purely descriptive sense of ‘reason’ that the error theorist can accept. I argue, however, that there is no descriptive sense of ‘reason’ that can prevent the paradox from re-emerging. Moreover, these implications of error theory probably provide good grounds for rejecting the view.
"White Privilege: A Conservative Perspective" and "Reply to Lowe," in Robert Fischer, ed., Ethics, Left and Right: The Issues that Divide Us (OUP, 2019). Penultimate drafts are here and here.
I argue that the discourse of “white privilege” is misleading and more likely to exacerbate racial tensions than help to ameliorate them. My central criticism of the notion of privilege is that it is ambiguous between a weak and a strong sense. Ambiguity is not itself inherently problematic. The trouble is that there is apparently no way of resolving the ambiguity while retaining all of the features of privilege that privilege opponents claim that it has. If race-based privilege is understood in the weaker sense, then white privilege clearly exists today, but its significance is unclear. On the other hand, if race-based privilege is defined in the strong sense, then it certainly has moral significance, but it’s unclear to what extent it currently exists.
"From Epistemic to Moral Realism," Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2019, 16(5): 541-562. Link here.
Both beliefs and actions can be assessed as being reasonable or unreasonable, right or wrong, good or bad. Some philosophers have thought that these commonalities are evidence for moral realism. After all, if epistemic and moral facts share all salient features, then the moral anti-realist cannot claim that moral facts are uniquely suspicious entities. If this reasoning is on point, then the best arguments against moral realism are not decisive given that we should accept epistemic facts. What it does not show, and what a realist might hope can be shown, is that if there are realistically-construed epistemic facts, then there are moral facts of the same level of robustness. That is what I hope to show here. (This paper was featured and discussed on the PEA Soup Blog February 15-17, 2019. David Enoch wrote a critical precis of the article. I responded to Enoch and others in the comments section below. Link here.)
"A Limited Defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument," Res Philosophica, 2017, 94(1): 165-175. Link to penultimate draft here.
The Kalām cosmological argument proceeds from the claims that everything with a beginning has a cause of its existence, and that the universe has a beginning. It follows that the universe has a cause of its existence. Presumably, this is God. Some defenders of the argument contend that, since we don’t see things randomly coming into existence, we know from experience that everything with a beginning has a cause of its existence. Some critics argue that we may not, in this context, legitimately move from observations of material things within the universe to conclusions about the universe itself. I argue that these critics are mistaken. Plausibly we can, after all, draw cosmic conclusions from everyday experiences in support of the Kalām argument.
"Normative Pluralism Worthy of the Name is False," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2016, 11(1). Link here.
Normative pluralism is the view that practical reason consists in an irreducible plurality of normative domains, that these domains sometimes issue conflicting recommendations and that, when this happens, there is never any one thing that one ought simpliciter to do. Here I argue against this view, noting that normative pluralism must be either unrestricted or restricted. Unrestricted pluralism maintains that all coherent standards are reason-generating normative domains, whereas restricted pluralism maintains that only some are. Unrestricted pluralism, depending on how it is cashed out, is either nihilism about practical reason or else it is subjectivism, neither of which is consistent with normative pluralism. Restricted pluralism faces two problems. The first stems from the question: “Why is it that some standards are normative domains while others are not?” The second is that restricted pluralism has difficulty accounting for our intuitions about cases in which one option is optimal in all domains, but not better than each alternative in any one domain. The unique option that is optimal in every domain seems better than its competitors, though it isn’t better within any domain.
"Rethinking Demandingness: Why Scalar Consequentialism and Satisficing Consequentialism are not Less Demanding than Maximizing Consequentialism," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2016, 10(1). Link here.
To object to a moral theory, such as maximizing consequentialism, on the grounds that it is too demanding is apparently to say that its requirements are implausibly stringent. This suggests an obvious response: Modify the theory so that its requirements are no longer as stringent. A consequentialist may do this either by placing the requirement threshold below maximization – thereby arriving at satisficing consequentialism – or, more radically, by dispensing with deontological notions such as “requirement” altogether – thereby arriving at scalar consequentialism. Suppose, however, that a moral theory’s demandingness is not a matter of its requirements being stringent, but whether it entails that we have most reason, all things considered, to undertake burdensome actions. If this is the right account of demandingness – as I shall argue – then neither modification necessarily alleviates demandingness. We are led to the surprising conclusion that neither satisficing consequentialism nor scalar consequentialism is inherently less demanding than their more familiar maximizing counterpart.
Published academic articles
"Holocaust perpetrators and Unjust combatants," Journal of Controversial Ideas, 2024, 4(2) (forthcoming)
There are compelling reasons to accept Revisionism in just war theory, the view, roughly, that combatants fighting on the unjust side of a war have no moral right to kill combatants fighting on the just side. This seems to imply that participating in an unjust war as an ordinary soldier is gravely immoral. Indeed, it’s hard to see why such soldiers aren’t the moral peers of the low-level Holocaust perpetrators who have been found guilty of many counts of aiding and abetting murder. This paper explores the implications of Revisionism for the moral culpability and blameworthiness of unjust combatants. I argue that (i) some unjust combatants who respect the rules of war are as culpable, and may be just as blameworthy, as low-level Holocaust perpetrators; however, (ii) there remain good grounds for thinking that such perpetrators are often more blameworthy than ordinary unjust combatants even if Revisionism is true.
"The Limits of Identity: Running Tuvel's Argument the Other Way," Journal of Controversial Ideas, 2022, 2(2). Link here.
Rebecca Tuvel provoked a firestorm by arguing that since we should accept trans* self-identification, we should accept transracial identification as well. This paper defends Tuvel’s conditional claim (if trans* acceptance, then transracial acceptance) but draws a different conclusion. I argue that reasoning similar to Tuvel’s establishes that people who identify as something other than human, and people who identify as physically disabled though their bodies aren’t impaired, plausibly also deserve recognition. This reductio ad absurdum of her reasoning should lead us to doubt whether we must embrace trans* self-identification as fully as self-described trans* allies claim that we must. This shouldn’t be construed to mean that trans* people, or members of any of these other groups, deserve anything less than respectful treatment and compassion as moral persons.
"Moral Extremism," Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2021, 38(4): 615-629. Link here.
The word “extremist” is often used pejoratively, but it’s not clear what, if anything, is wrong with extremism. My project is to give an account of moral extremism as a vice. It consists roughly in having moral convictions so intense that they cause a sort of moral tunnel vision, pushing salient competing considerations out of mind. We should be interested in moral extremism for several reasons: it’s consequential, it’s insidious –we don’t expect immorality to arise from excessive devotion to morality – and it’s yet to attract much philosophical attention. I give several examples of moral extremism from history and explore their social-political implications. I also consider how we should evaluate people who miss the mark, being either too extreme in the service of a good cause, or inconsistent with their righteous convictions. I compare John Brown and John Quincy Adams, who fell on either side of this spectrum, as examples.
"Small Evils and Live Options: A New Strategy Against the Argument from Evil," Philosophia Christi, 2020, 22(2): 307-321. Link here.
Many philosophers have thought that aggregates of small, broadly dispersed evils don’t pose the same sort of challenge to theism that horrendous evils like the Nazi Holocaust do. But there are interesting arguments that purport to show that large enough aggregates of small evils are morally and axiologically equivalent to horrendous evils. Herein lies an intriguing and overlooked strategy for defending theism. In short: small evils, or aggregates of such evils, don’t provide decisive evidence against theism; there’s no relevant difference between horrendous evils and aggregates of small evils; hence horrendous evils must not provide decisive evidence against theism, either.
"Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice," Philosophia, 2020, 49(1): 197-216. Link to penultimate draft here.
Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have focused on epistemic injustices involving certain social categories, particularly race and gender. Can there be epistemic injustice attached to political conviction and affiliation? I argue yes: politics can be a salient social category that draws epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices might also be intersectional, based on the overlap of politics and some other identity category like race or sex. Further, and more provocatively, I argue that political minorities in academia, in particular conservatives and libertarians, are most likely the victims of epistemic injustice on the basis of their politics. Such epistemic injustices might even be routine. Although more limited in scope and severity than other forms of epistemic injustice, political epistemic injustices in academia ought to be of special concern from a standpoint of social justice because of the academy’s central role in knowledge production and dissemination.
"The Normative Error Theorist Cannot Avoid Self-Defeat," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2020, 98(1): 92-104. Link here.
Many philosophers have noted that normative error theorists appear to be committed to saying ‘Error theory is true, but I have no reason to believe it’, which seems paradoxical. In defense of error theory, some have claimed that the word ‘reason’ in that statement is ambiguous between ‘normative reason’ and a purely descriptive sense of ‘reason’ that the error theorist can accept. I argue, however, that there is no descriptive sense of ‘reason’ that can prevent the paradox from re-emerging. Moreover, these implications of error theory probably provide good grounds for rejecting the view.
"White Privilege: A Conservative Perspective" and "Reply to Lowe," in Robert Fischer, ed., Ethics, Left and Right: The Issues that Divide Us (OUP, 2019). Penultimate drafts are here and here.
I argue that the discourse of “white privilege” is misleading and more likely to exacerbate racial tensions than help to ameliorate them. My central criticism of the notion of privilege is that it is ambiguous between a weak and a strong sense. Ambiguity is not itself inherently problematic. The trouble is that there is apparently no way of resolving the ambiguity while retaining all of the features of privilege that privilege opponents claim that it has. If race-based privilege is understood in the weaker sense, then white privilege clearly exists today, but its significance is unclear. On the other hand, if race-based privilege is defined in the strong sense, then it certainly has moral significance, but it’s unclear to what extent it currently exists.
"From Epistemic to Moral Realism," Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2019, 16(5): 541-562. Link here.
Both beliefs and actions can be assessed as being reasonable or unreasonable, right or wrong, good or bad. Some philosophers have thought that these commonalities are evidence for moral realism. After all, if epistemic and moral facts share all salient features, then the moral anti-realist cannot claim that moral facts are uniquely suspicious entities. If this reasoning is on point, then the best arguments against moral realism are not decisive given that we should accept epistemic facts. What it does not show, and what a realist might hope can be shown, is that if there are realistically-construed epistemic facts, then there are moral facts of the same level of robustness. That is what I hope to show here. (This paper was featured and discussed on the PEA Soup Blog February 15-17, 2019. David Enoch wrote a critical precis of the article. I responded to Enoch and others in the comments section below. Link here.)
"A Limited Defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument," Res Philosophica, 2017, 94(1): 165-175. Link to penultimate draft here.
The Kalām cosmological argument proceeds from the claims that everything with a beginning has a cause of its existence, and that the universe has a beginning. It follows that the universe has a cause of its existence. Presumably, this is God. Some defenders of the argument contend that, since we don’t see things randomly coming into existence, we know from experience that everything with a beginning has a cause of its existence. Some critics argue that we may not, in this context, legitimately move from observations of material things within the universe to conclusions about the universe itself. I argue that these critics are mistaken. Plausibly we can, after all, draw cosmic conclusions from everyday experiences in support of the Kalām argument.
"Normative Pluralism Worthy of the Name is False," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2016, 11(1). Link here.
Normative pluralism is the view that practical reason consists in an irreducible plurality of normative domains, that these domains sometimes issue conflicting recommendations and that, when this happens, there is never any one thing that one ought simpliciter to do. Here I argue against this view, noting that normative pluralism must be either unrestricted or restricted. Unrestricted pluralism maintains that all coherent standards are reason-generating normative domains, whereas restricted pluralism maintains that only some are. Unrestricted pluralism, depending on how it is cashed out, is either nihilism about practical reason or else it is subjectivism, neither of which is consistent with normative pluralism. Restricted pluralism faces two problems. The first stems from the question: “Why is it that some standards are normative domains while others are not?” The second is that restricted pluralism has difficulty accounting for our intuitions about cases in which one option is optimal in all domains, but not better than each alternative in any one domain. The unique option that is optimal in every domain seems better than its competitors, though it isn’t better within any domain.
"Rethinking Demandingness: Why Scalar Consequentialism and Satisficing Consequentialism are not Less Demanding than Maximizing Consequentialism," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2016, 10(1). Link here.
To object to a moral theory, such as maximizing consequentialism, on the grounds that it is too demanding is apparently to say that its requirements are implausibly stringent. This suggests an obvious response: Modify the theory so that its requirements are no longer as stringent. A consequentialist may do this either by placing the requirement threshold below maximization – thereby arriving at satisficing consequentialism – or, more radically, by dispensing with deontological notions such as “requirement” altogether – thereby arriving at scalar consequentialism. Suppose, however, that a moral theory’s demandingness is not a matter of its requirements being stringent, but whether it entails that we have most reason, all things considered, to undertake burdensome actions. If this is the right account of demandingness – as I shall argue – then neither modification necessarily alleviates demandingness. We are led to the surprising conclusion that neither satisficing consequentialism nor scalar consequentialism is inherently less demanding than their more familiar maximizing counterpart.