PUBLICATIONS

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What Are We to Do? Making Sense of 'Joint Ought' Talk Philosophical Studies (forthcoming), co-authored with Margaret Shea

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In this paper, my co-author and I argue that the sentence ‘a and b ought to φ and ψ’ can have a different truth-value to the pair of sentences ‘a ought to φ’ and ‘b ought to ψ’. We show how to accommodate this finding within two opposing semantic models for ‘ought’: Mark Schroeder’s ‘relational’ view, and Angelika Kratzer’s ‘contextualist’ view.

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Joint Ought Philosophy and Public Affairs 52 (2024): 42-68. ​

Selected for a PEA Soup Discussion.

 

​This paper proposes that there are ‘oughts’ which hold jointly of many agents – ‘joint oughts’ – and argues that this view provides the best solution to a well-known puzzle case.​

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Faces of Vicarious Responsibility The Monist 104 (2021): 238-250.

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Can a person vicariously bear responsibility on another’s behalf? This idea is counterintuitive. Yet many real-world practices seem to lend it validity. In the paper, I distinguish three forms of responsibility, and argue that one of them – ‘substantive responsibility’ – can genuinely be borne vicariously. I then show how this abstract claim can further our understanding of concrete legal and political issues: specifically, the common-law doctrine of joint enterprise, and reparations for historic injustice.

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IN THE PIPELINE

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[A paper which develops the concept of joint reasoning by arguing that co-deliberators must share their reasons in the following sense: when two agents reason jointly to a conclusion C, each must take the reasons for which the other endorses C to be sufficient normative reasons]

 

[A paper which argues against the view that joint obligations transmit to individual obligations to do one’s part]

 

[A paper which describes and motivates a distinctive form of forgiveness, which I call 'forgiveness as humility']

 

[A paper defending the view that we have no reason to avoid acts which make no difference to collective harms]

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RECENT TALKS

(see my CV for a full list)

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Thinking Together

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• Philadelphia Normative Philosophy Conference 2024

• Social Ontology 2024

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Why Cooperate? Team Reasons, Participation, and Unwillingness

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• Laval Everything Agency Conference 2024

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What Are We to Do? The Semantics and Ethics of the Joint Ought

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• Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop 2023

• Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress 2023

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Joint Ought

 

• Berkeley Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and  Political Theory 2022

• Humboldt Normativity Conference 2022

• Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress 2022

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