Publications
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1. "Effective Altruism, Disaster Prevention, and the Possibility of Hell: A Dilemma for Secular Longtermists" Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion
Longtermist Effective Altruists (EAs) aim to mitigate the risk of existential catastrophes. In this paper, I have three goals. First, I identify a catastrophic risk that has been completely ignored by EAs. I call it religious catastrophe: the threat that (as Christians and Muslims have warned for centuries) billions of people stand in danger of going to hell for all eternity. Second, I argue that, even by secular EA lights, religious catastrophe is at least as bad and at least as probable, and therefore at least as important as many of the standard EA catastrophic risks (e.g., catastrophic climate change, nuclear winter). Third, I present the following dilemma for secular EAs: either adopt religious catastrophe as an EA cause or ignore religious catastrophe but also ignore catastrophic risks whose mitigation has a similar, or lower, expected value (i.e., most, or all, of them). Business as usual—ignoring religious catastrophe while championing the usual EA causes—is not an option consistent with longtermist EA principles.

Penultimate Version
2. "Moorean Arguments Against the Error Theory: A Defense", Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol. 18 (2023)
Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful way to engage highly revisionary philosophical views such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., external world, other minds, inductive, global). They take, as a premise, a highly plausible first-order claim (e.g., cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills) and conclude from it the falsity of the highly revisionary philosophical thesis. Moorean arguments can be used against nihilists in ethics (error theorists), too. Recently, error theorists have recognized Moorean arguments as a powerful challenge and have tried to meet it. They’ve argued that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us, but aren’t, by offering various debunking explanations. These explanations all appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence of error in our reasoning. I argue that drawing attention to higher-order evidence is a welcome contribution from error theorists, but that the higher-order evidence actually counts further against error theoretic arguments—including their debunking explanations—and further in favor of Moorean arguments and the commonsense views they support. Along the way I answer a few prominent objections to Moorean arguments: that they are objectionably question-begging, rely on categorizing some facts as “Moorean Facts”, and that reports of one’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to that proposition’s credibility. 
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3. "Do the Standards of Rationality Depend on Resource Context?", Acta Analytica (2022)
People sometimes knowingly undermine the achievement of their own goals by, e.g., playing the lottery or borrowing from loan sharks. Are these agents acting irrationally? The standard answer is “yes”. But, in a recent award-winning paper, Jennifer Morton argues “no”. On her view, the norms of practical reasoning an agent ought to follow depend on that agent’s resource context (roughly, how rich or poor they are). If Morton is correct, the orthodox view that the same norms of practical rationality apply to all agents needs revision. I argue that Morton’s arguments fail on both empirical and philosophical grounds. What’s at stake? If Morton is correct, poverty-relief agencies ought to re-design their incentives so resource-scarce agents can rationally respond to them. If I’m correct, resource-scarce agents do act irrationally in the cases under discussion, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying so. Instead of declaring them rational, we should try to understand the causes of their irrational behavior and help them better succeed by their own lights.

Published Version
Philpapers
4.  "What if Ideal Advice Conflicts?: A Dilemma for Idealizing Accounts of Normative Practical Reasons", Philosophical Studies​ (2021): 1-22.
I present a dilemma for the most popular version of anti-realism about practical normativity: idealizing reasons subjectivism. This is the view that an agent’s reasons for action are grounded, not in her actual pro-attitudes, but rather in what her pro-attitudes would be if she were fully non-normatively informed and ideally structurally rational. I argue that this view presupposes that, for any agent with an irrational set of attitudes, there is one uniquely rational set that that agent would have if she were to undergo the relevant idealizing process. I argue that this assumption is false and that it raises two puzzles for idealizing subjectivism: one about the existence of practical reasons and another about their normative weight. I argue that when idealizing subjectivists try to solve the second puzzle, they confront a dilemma. This second puzzle and the associated dilemma constitutes a powerful, but as-yet unnoticed, difficulty for idealizing subjectivism. 

Published Version
Philpapers​
5.  "How Rational Level-Splitting Beliefs Can Help You Rationally Respond to Moral Disagreement", (with Margaret Greta Turnbull), in Michael Klenk (ed.), Higher Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge (2020)
We provide a novel defense of the possibility and rationality of level-splitting beliefs. We use this defense to show that the steadfast response to peer disagreement is not, as it is often claimed to be, irrationally dogmatic. To provide this defense, we analyse a neglected form of moral disagreement. Within that context, we identify a similarly neglected form of level-splitting belief and argue that it is immune to standard criticisms of the rationality of level-splitting beliefs. We conclude by showing that proponents of the steadfast response to peer disagreement can rationally adopt this form of level-splitting belief in the context of moral disagreements while exemplifying intellectual humility, rather than dogmatism.

Published Version
​Philpapers
6.  ​"The Self-Undermining Arguments from Disagreement", ​Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol. 14 (2019): 23-46.
Abstract: ​​​Arguments from disagreement against non-skeptical moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among a certain group of people (e.g., the folk, moral philosophers, idealized agents). Then, some skeptical or anti-realist-friendly conclusion is drawn. I argue that arguments from disagreement share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single, powerful objection: they self-undermine. For each formulation of the argument from disagreement, at least one of its premises casts doubt either on itself or on one of the other premises. On reflection, this should not be surprising. Proponents of these arguments seek to derive a very strong metaphysical or epistemological conclusion about morality (e.g., that there are no moral facts, that none of our moral beliefs are epistemically justified). They must therefore employ very strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy—especially about metaphysics and epistemology—very strong premises are almost certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement. And this is precisely the sort of disagreement that proponents of these arguments think undermine moral claims. If so, then these arguments undermine their own premises. If the argument presented in this paper is sound, it provides realists a single, unified strategy for responding to arguments from disagreement. It also provides a challenge for any future arguments from disagreement that philosophers might advance.

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Philpapers
7.  ​"Against Scanlon's Theory of the Strength of Practical Reasons", Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy​ 3 (2015): 1-6.
Abstract: 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 to this question. His answer appeals to counterfactuals of various kinds. I argue that appealing to counterfactuals leads to deep problems for his view.

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Philpapers
8.  ​"On Believing the Error Theory", Journal of Philosophy 111 (2014): 631-640. (with Alexander Hyun)
​Abstract: Bart Streumer (2013) argues that it is impossible to believe the normative error theory--the view that there are no irreducibly normative properties. This might sound like a problem for the error theory, but Streumer argues that it's not. He argues that the un-believability of the error theory offers a way for error theorists to respond to several objections commonly made against the view. In this paper, we offer several objections to Streumer’s argument for the claim that we cannot believe the error theory. We then argue that, even if Streumer establishes that we cannot believe the error theory, this conclusion is not as helpful for error theorists as he thinks.

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Philpapers
9.  “Parsimony and the Argument from Queerness” (with Justin Morton), Res Philosophica 91 (2014): 609-627. (with Justin Morton)
Abstract: The argument from queerness, made famous by J.L. Mackie (1977), is one of the most influential arguments in metaethics. In this paper, we do three things. First, we eliminate four untenable formulations of the argument. Second, we argue that the strongest formulation, defended most recently by Jonas Olson (2014), depends crucially upon Ockham's Razor (or considerations of parsimony). Finally, we evaluate this formulation of the argument. We conclude that it is unproblematic for proponents of moral non-naturalism—the target of the argument from queerness.

Published Version
Philpapers