I mostly do non-ideal moral psychology: thoughts about motivation and praiseworthiness for messy humans in an unjust world. Sometimes I do other things.
I’ll be on sabbatical during AY 2023-4 and will be writing a book. The book is provisionally entitled Praiseworthiness: Its Contours and Limits and is under contract with Oxford University Press. Email me if you’d like to hear more about it.
N.B. I won’t be accepting many speaking invitations this year, so that I can focus on the book.
Here are some of my papers.
In Progress
The Slow Clap Phenomenon. About moral “achievements” that are intuitively too basic to be praiseworthy. Email me for a draft.
Working on Yourself. About how we should react to our moral achievements and moral failures, and to those of others. Here’s a draft.
Reluctant Heroes. About how the applause and all the ‘heroes’ rhetoric surrounding essential workers during pandemic was kinda messed up, even though many of them were indeed highly praiseworthy. Here’s a draft.
Coat-Checkers Are People Too. About why we should stop using the Cosmos Club example. Email me for a draft.
Published and Forthcoming
On the Epistemic Significance of Noise (with Boris Babic). Forthcoming in a special issue of Oxford Studies in Epistemology on applied epistemology.
About how cases in which statistical evidence licenses a high posterior credence in a predictive inference about an individual’s possessing a negative trait are actually super rare, and hence we can explain what is wrong with these inferences from within a standard Bayesian point of view. Here’s a draft.
Moral Encroachment Under Moral Uncertainty (with Boris Babic). Forthcoming in Philosophers’ Imprint.
About what to do when you’d love to take account of the moral risks involved in forming and revising your doxastic states, but you aren’t sure exactly what those risks are. This paper is published with open access: here’s a link.
Algorithmic Fairness and Resentment (with Boris Babic). In a special issue of Philosophical Studies about ethics and AI.
About how Bayesian Strawsonians can think about algorithmic bias in a way that is neither metaphorical nor anthropomorphic. Here’s the penultimate version.
Introducing Metaethics. In Think! Philosophy for Everyone.
An introduction to metaethics, aimed at an audience of students studying for the AQA A-level in Religious Studies, Ethics, and Philosophy (which I myself have both taken and taught). Here’s the penultimate version.
On Snobbery. In The British Journal of Aesthetics.
About snobbery, obviously. Here’s the penultimate version.
Varieties of Moral Mistake. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
About different ways of being mistaken about non-moral facts’ moral significance, and what they each say about you. Here’s the penultimate version.
Radical Internalism. In Philosophical Issues: A Supplement to Noûs.
About why Amia Srinivasan’s paper “Radical Externalism” is wrong. Here’s the penultimate version.
Sensitivity, Safety, and Admissibility. In Synthese.
About recent attempts to use the notions of sensitivity and safety to explain the (purported) inadmissibility of bare statistical evidence. Here’s the penultimate version.
“Grasping” Morality. Forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Studies on Ellie Mason’s Ways To Be Blameworthy.
About Mason’s idea that ordinary blame-reactions are only appropriate in response to the wrongdoing of agents who are members of our moral community, as determined by their “grasp” of morality. Here’s the “full” version, and here’s the “abridged” version (which will appear in Phil Studies).
Internalism and Externalism. Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Metaethics, ed. Connie Rosati and David Copp.
About whether moral judgments motivate. Here’s the current version.
Praise and Positive Behavior Management. In Pedagogies of Punishment, eds. Winston Thompson and John Tillson.
About positive behavior management, as understood in pedagogical circles and practiced in schools, and why theorists of agency and responsibility should pay attention to it. Here’s the penultimate version.
Deliberation and Moral Motivation. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol, 17, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau.
About what ordinary people are trying to do when they are trying to strike the right balance between everything important at stake. Here’s the penultimate version.
What Are We Praiseworthy For? In New Conversations in Philosophy, Law, and Politics, eds. Ruth Chang and Amia Srinivasan.
About praiseworthy motivations, praiseworthy actions, and the relationships between the two. Here’s the current version.
Who’s Afraid of Normative Externalism? In Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Philosophy of Allan Gibbard, eds. Billy Dunaway and David Plunkett.
About how tricky it is to develop coherent principles to guide the decision-making of agents who are not only first-order morally uncertain but also uncertain as to whether those principles themselves are correct. Here’s the penultimate version.
The Trouble with Standards of Proof. In Synthese.
About some difficulties we face in trying to justify standards of proof, construed as probabilistic thresholds, based on intuitions about optimal error ratios. Here’s the penultimate version.
Moral Obligation and Epistemic Risk (with Boris Babic). In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, vol. 10, ed. Mark Timmons.
About how a Bayesian approach to moral encroachment evades alleged conflicts between the requirements of epistemic rationality and those of morality. Here’s the penultimate version.
Don’t Know, Don’t Care? In Philosophical Studies.
About cases in which people remain somewhat morally ignorant despite caring more than adequately about everything that is in fact morally significant. Here’s the penultimate version.
We Can Have our Buck and Pass It, Too. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 14, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau.
About whether the rightness of an act or its right-making features are reasons to perform it. (Spoiler: it’s both.) Here’s the penultimate version.
Praiseworthy Motivations. In Noûs.
About which motivations are praiseworthy. Probably the best paper I’ve written, IMO. Here’s the penultimate version.
Accidentally Doing the Right Thing. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
About why, contrary to popular belief, Huck Finn does not act with moral worth and is instead kind of a weirdo jerk. (Note for moral worth theorists: I deny that acting with moral worth and being praiseworthy for acting are the same thing. This is my paper on moral worth. I have other papers on praiseworthiness, which you can find above.) Here’s the penultimate version.