Publications
Click to see the abstract and a link to the paper.
1. Effective Altruism, Disaster Prevention, and the Possibility of Hell: A Dilemma for Secular Longtermists
  • Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, vol. 12 (forthcoming)
Longtermist Effective Altruists (EAs) aim to reduce the risk of existential catastrophes. This paper identifies a catastrophic risk that EAs have almost entirely ignored. I call it religious catastrophe: the threat that, as Christians and Muslims have long warned, billions may suffer eternal damnation. I argue that, even by secular EA standards, religious catastrophe is at least as bad, at least as probable, and therefore at least as important as many familiar EA catastrophic risks, such as catastrophic climate change, stellar explosions, or global nuclear winter. Secular EAs therefore face a dilemma: either adopt religious catastrophe as an EA cause, or ignore it, but also ignore all EA causes with a comparable or lower expected value (i.e., most or all of them). Either way, business as usual—ignoring religious catastrophe while championing the standard EA causes—is incompatible with secular longtermist principles.

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2. Moorean Arguments Against the Error Theory: A Defense
  • ​Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol. 18: 191-217. (2023)
Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful response to radically revisionary philosophical views such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., global, external world, other minds, and inductive). They begin with a highly plausible first-order claim—cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills—and conclude that the revisionary thesis is false. The same strategy can be used against nihilism in ethics (error theory). Error theorists have recently recognized Moorean arguments as a serious challenge. Their response is to concede that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us while denying that they really are. They do this by offering various debunking explanations for our moral beliefs that appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence that our reasoning has gone wrong. I argue that error theorists are right to emphasize higher-order evidence but wrong about where it leads. Properly assessed, this evidence further undermines arguments for error theory, including its debunking arguments, while strengthening Moorean arguments and the commonsense moral views they support. Along the way, I answer several classic objections to Moorean arguments: that they're objectionably question-begging, depend on the dubious category of “Moorean fact,” and that a person’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to its credibility.
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3. Do the Standards of Rationality Depend on Resource Context?
  • Acta Analytica 38 (2): 323-333. (2022)
People sometimes knowingly undermine their own goals—for example, by playing the lottery or borrowing from loan sharks. When they do, are they acting irrationally? The standard answer is yes. But in a recent award-winning paper, Jennifer Morton argues that the norms of practical reasoning an agent is rationally required to follow depend on that agent's resource context—roughly, on how rich or poor they are. If she's right, we must abandon the orthodox view that the same norms of practical rationality apply to everyone. I argue that Morton’s case fails on both empirical and philosophical grounds. What’s at stake? If Morton is right, poverty-relief agencies ought to redesign their incentives so that resource-scarce agents can rationally respond to them. If I’m right, these agents act irrationally in the cases at issue, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying so. Rather than declaring them rational, we should identify the causes of their irrationality and help them succeed by their own lights.​

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4.  What if Ideal Advice Conflicts?: A Dilemma for Idealizing Accounts of Normative Practical Reasons
  • Philosophical Studies​ 179 (4): 1091-1111. (2021)
I present a dilemma for the leading anti-realist theory of practical normativity: idealizing reasons subjectivism. According to this view, an agent’s reasons for action are grounded not in her actual pro-attitudes, but in those she would have if fully non-normatively informed and ideally structurally rational. I argue that the view assumes that, for any agent with irrational attitudes, the relevant idealizing process yields a uniquely rational set. This assumption is false, and its failure generates two puzzles for idealizing subjectivism: one about which practical reasons exist and another about how much normative weight they have. Attempts to solve the second puzzle confront idealizing subjectivists with a dilemma. They must hold either that the weights of an agent’s reasons are arbitrarily determined by the attitudes of just one of her many ideal counterparts or that they are determined by some amalgamation of those counterparts’ attitudes that it would be positively irrational for any agent to possess. Both horns are deeply implausible. The dilemma therefore constitutes a powerful but as-yet unnoticed objection to idealizing subjectivism.

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5.  How Rational Level-Splitting Beliefs Can Help You Rationally Respond to Moral Disagreement  (with Greta Turnbull)
  • In Michael Klenk (ed.), Higher Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge, pp. 239-255. (2020)
We provide a novel defense of the possibility and rationality of level-splitting beliefs. We use it to show that the steadfast response to peer disagreement is not irrationally dogmatic, as critics often claim. Focusing on a neglected form of moral disagreement, we identify a similarly neglected kind of level-splitting belief and argue that it escapes the standard objections to such beliefs. We conclude by showing how proponents of the steadfast response to peer disagreement can rationally adopt this form of level-splitting belief in the face of moral disagreement while exemplifying intellectual humility rather than dogmatism.

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6.  ​The Self-Undermining Arguments from Disagreement
  • ​Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol. 14: 23-46. (2019)
Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among some group—ordinary people, moral philosophers, idealized agents--and draw a skeptical or anti-realist conclusion. I argue that all such arguments share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single powerful objection: they self-undermine. In every formulation, at least one premise casts doubt either on itself or another premise. On reflection, this should not be surprising. To derive sweeping metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality—for example, that there are no moral facts or that none of our moral beliefs are justified—these arguments require correspondingly strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy—especially in metaphysics and epistemology—such premises are almost certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement: precisely the kind proponents of these arguments claim undermines moral claims. These arguments therefore undermine their own premises. If my argument is sound, it provides realists a single, unified strategy for responding to arguments from disagreement and poses a challenge to any future versions philosophers may advance.

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7.  ​Against Scanlon's Theory of the Strength of Practical Reasons
  • ​Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy​ 9 (3):1-6. (2015)
We often say that one reason is stronger, or weightier, than another. These are metaphors. What does normative strength or weight really consist in? Scanlon (2014) offers a novel answer in terms of counterfactuals. I argue that this appeal to counterfactuals creates deep problems for his view.

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8.  ​On Believing the Error Theory (with Alex Hyun)
  • Journal of Philosophy 111: 631-640. (2014)
Bart Streumer (2013) argues that it is impossible to believe the normative error theory—the view that there are no irreducibly normative properties. This may seem to count against the view, but Streumer argues quite the opposite: that it helps error theorists answer several classic objections. In this paper, we challenge both parts of Streumer's case. First, we raise several objections to his argument that the error theory is unbelievable. Second, we argue that even if it is unbelievable, this helps error theorists far less than Streumer claims.

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9.  Parsimony and the Argument from Queerness (with Justin Morton)
  • Res Philosophica 91: 609-627. (2014)
The argument from queerness is among the most influential arguments in metaethics. We assess it in three stages. First, we reject four untenable formulations. Second, we argue that the strongest formulation, most recently defended by Jonas Olson (2014), rests crucially on Ockham’s Razor, or considerations of parsimony. Finally, we evaluate this formulation and conclude that it poses no serious problem for its target: moral nonnaturalism.

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