Publications
Forthcoming
“Addressing Threats to Future Global Health: What is the Right Timeframe?”
(with Chrisoula Andreou, Mark Budolfson, Tim Campbell, Maddalena Ferranna, Anders Herlitz, Petra Kosonen, Kacper Kowalczyk, Adam J. Lerner, Michael Otsuka, Melinda Roberts, Robert Steel, Bastian Steuwer, Daniel Wikler, Bridget Williams, and Nir Eyal) The Lancet
“Future Generations and the Evidential Veil of Ignorance”
(with Johan Gustafsson) Economics & Philosophy
Published
2026
“Welfare and Felt Duration”
Noûs 60, 563-575
“Desire-Fulfilment and Consciousness”
Philosophical Studies 183, 511-529.
2025
“How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument”
Synthese 206, 252
“Would a World Without Us Be Worse? Clues from Population Axiology”
in Barrett, Greaves, Thorstad, eds. Essays on Longtermism, 86-104 (Oxford University Press)
“Once More, Without Feeling”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 111, 343-365.
2024
“The Weight of Suffering”
The Journal of Philosophy 121, 335-354
“On the Desire to Make a Difference”
(with Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill, and Teru Thomas) Philosophical Studies 181, 1599-1626
“Respect for Others’ Risk Attitudes and the Long-Run Future”
Noûs 58, 1017-1031
“The Hinge of History Hypothesis: reply to MacAskill”
Analysis 84, 47-55
2022
“Evolution, Utilitarianism, and Normative Uncertainty: the Practical Significance of Debunking Arguments”
(with William MacAskill) Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22
“The only ethical argument for positive δ? Partiality and pure time preference”
Philosophical Studies 179, 2731–2750
“Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis”
(with David Thorstad) Synthese 200, 36
“Fine-Tuning the Darwinian Dilemma”
in Machuca, ed., Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Philosophy, 56-80 (Routledge)
“Population Ethical Intuitions”
(with Lucius Caviola, David Althaus, Geoffrey Goodwin) Cognition 218, 104941
“Against Large Number Scepticism”
in McMahan, Campbell, Goodrich, and Ramakrishnan, eds., Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit, 311-30 (Oxford University Press)
2021
“Moral Demands and the Far Future”
Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 103, 567-85.
“The Paralysis Argument”
(with Will MacAskill) Philosophers’ Imprint 21, 1-17
“Is Identity Illusory?”
European Journal of Philosophy 29, 55-73
“Maximal Cluelessness”
The Philosophical Quarterly 71, 141-62
“Should You Save the More Useful? The Effect of Generality on Moral Judgment About Rescue and Indirect Effects”
(with Lucius Caviola and Stefan Schubert) Cognition 206, 1-15
2020
“Meaning, Medicine, and Merit”
Utilitas 32, 90-107
2019
“Racial Profiling and Cumulative Injustice”
Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 98, 452-77
“The Callousness Objection”
in Pummer and Greaves, eds., Effective Altruism: Philosophical Perspectives, pp. 227-43 (Oxford University Press)
“Life-Years at Stake: Justifying and Modelling Acquisition of Life Potential for DALYS”
in Gamlund and Tollef, eds. Saving people from the harm of death, pp. 48-60 (Oxford University Press)
2018
“The Brave Officer Rides Again”
Erkenntnis 83, 315-329
“Giving Isn’t Demanding”
(with William MacAskill and Toby Ord) in Woodruff, ed. The ethics of giving: philosophers’ perspectives on philanthropy, pp. 178-203 (Oxford University Press)
“How Ecumenical Expressivism Confuses the Trivial and the Substantive”
Analysis 78, 666-674
2017
“Disagreements in Moral Intuition as Defeaters”
The Philosophical Quarterly, 67, 282–302.
“Moral Testimony Pessimism and the Uncertain Value of Authenticity”
Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 95, 261-284.
2016
“Do Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Rest on a Mistake About Evolutionary Explanations?”
Philosophical Studies 173, 1799-1817
“Should We Prevent Optimific Wrongs?”
Utilitas 28, 215-226
2015
“Contingency Anxiety and the Epistemology of Disagreement”
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97
“Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and the Proximate/Ultimate Distinction”
Analysis 75, 196-203
DPhil thesis
My 2014 DPhil/PhD thesis was on evolutionary debunking arguments in ethics, considering whether evolutionary explanations for human moral beliefs might require us to revise our moral outlook.
“Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Ethics”
I consider whether evolutionary explanations can debunk our moral beliefs. Most contemporary discussion in this area is centred on the question of whether debunking implications follow from our ability to explain elements of human morality in terms of natural selection, given that there has been no selection for true moral beliefs. By considering the most prominent arguments in the literature today, I offer reasons to think that debunking arguments of this kind fail. However, I argue that a successful evolutionary debunking argument can be constructed by appeal to the suggestion that our moral outlook reflects arbitrary contingencies of our phylogeny, much as the horizontal orientation of the whale’s tail reflects its descent from terrestrial quadrupeds.