Publications
Forthcoming
“Evolution, Utilitarianism, and Normative Uncertainty: the Practical Significance of Debunking Arguments”
(with William MacAskill) Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy
Published
2022
“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.
In progress and under review
You can find my working papers online (alongside many more interesting papers) as part of the GPI working paper series.