Research
My work is primarily in ethics and social and political philosophy. I am especially interested in how we should think about the good of groups, as well as questions about interventions (in the form of policy or technological developments) into important social institutions. Here is a list of themes and current projects, all of which are at different stages of development. If you work in one of these areas, or if you are interested in exploring one, I am always happy to discuss or collaborate.
Themes and Projects
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A theoretical backbone to my work: what is there to the ethics of communal life beyond individual interests and projects?
My dissertation speaks directly to this topic. It first provides an argument against strong moral individualism, then proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating the well-being of groups, and finally uses the theory developed to provide a better account of outsider obligations to voluntarily isolated or unconnected social groups.
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An extension of my work on group well-being, I am interested in the well-being, rights, and responsibilities of corporate and political institutions, and whether our moral concern should extend to set of people and institutions that are too loosely constituted to count as a social group (for example, markets and interest groups).
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I am interested in questions about how to understand the nature and social roles of technology very broadly construed. My specific focuses here are law and money, which expedite social behaviors, and automation and AI, which have gone from helping to scale production to now shaping important social dimensions of our lives.