Research#

Publications#

2025 - Teaching the Ethics of Nudging: An Interdisciplinary Integration Course in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Teaching Philosophy. [Published version]

2024 - Framing effects from misleading implicatures: an empirically based case against some purported nudges. Journal of Medical Ethics. [Published version][Philpapers PDF][Blog post]

2024 - Eliciting and Assessing our Moral Risk Preferences. American Philosophical Quarterly. [Published version]

2023 - Against Metasemantics-First Moral Epistemology. (Coauthored with Jesse Hambly) Journal of Ethics. [Published version][Philpapers PDF]

2023 - A disanalogy with RCTs and its implications for second-generation causal knowledge. (Coauthored with Kate Lynch, Rachael Brown, Jeremy Strasser – I am last author) Behavioral and Brain Sciences. [Published version][PsyArXiv PDF]

2022 - A Bayesian Analysis of Debunking Arguments in Ethics. Philosophical Studies. [Published version][Philpapers PDF]

2020 - Defusing the Regress Challenge to Debunking Arguments. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 50(6), 785-800. [Published version] [Philpapers PDF]

2017 - Measuring the Consequences of Rules: A Reply to Smith. Utilitas, 29(1), 125-131. [Published version] [Philpapers PDF]

Works in Progress#

  • Several papers on the ethics of nudging
  • Several papers on reflective equilibrium
  • A coauthored paper on standpoint epistemology
  • A coauthored paper on prospect-theoretic reference points

PhD Thesis: The Scope and Limits of Debunking Arguments in Ethics#

Debunking arguments use empirical evidence about the causal origins of our moral beliefs in order to reach an epistemic conclusion about the trustworthiness of such beliefs. In this thesis, I investigate the scope and limits of debunking arguments, and their implications for what we should believe about morality. I argue that debunking arguments can in principle work – they are based on plausible epistemic premises, and at least some of them avoid putative problems concerning regress and redundancy. However, I also argue that some debunking arguments fall short because they are insufficiently supported by the empirical evidence. By considering different objections, analyses, and a case study, I explore when – and how – such arguments work.

Supervisory Panel: Christian Barry (chair), Alan Hájek, Katie Steele, Kim Sterelny

Teaching Forward