Title: The Permissibility of Lesser Evil Abstract: Flood: Flood water is headed toward a cave where five innocent people are trapped and will be killed if the water reaches them. The water can be diverted into a mineshaft, but innocent Betty is trapped in the mineshaft and will be killed if the water is redirected. ... Read more
TITLE: ‘Interactional Wrongs and Vices’ ABSTRACT: This paper explores a domain of action that we often regard as a minor moral matter, the domain of ordinary interactions. Yet, ordinary interactions are morally significant for two reasons: they are the primary vehicle through which 1) we show respect and disrespect for each other, and 2) we ... Read more
Title: Big Data and the Risk of Misguided Responsibilization Abstract: The arrival of “big data” promises new degrees of precision in understanding human behavior. Could it also make it possible to draw a finer line between individual choices and circumstances that operate in the background? In a culture in which individual responsibility continues to ... Read more
Title: Value Capture Abstract: Value capture occurs when an agent enters a social environment which presents external expressions of value — which are often simplified, standardized, and quantified — and those external versions come to dominate our reasoning and motivations. Examples include becoming motivated by Twitter Likes and Retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best ... Read more
Title: ‘The limits of ideology critique’ Abstract: The tradition of ideology critique promises a lot. It promises to be critical of the existing social order. (Good!) But it promises to generate this critique without appealing to ‘external’ normative standards. In this talk I argue on meta-normative grounds that ideology critique cannot make good on these ... Read more
Title: Ameliorative Skepticism and the Nature of Health Abstract: In this talk, I’ll give a brief overview of the project I call ‘ameliorative skepticism’. Sally Haslanger has argued that, in doing social ontology, we can sometimes approach the question ‘what is x?’ by asking question ‘what do we want x to be?’. I argue that ... Read more
Title: "Against 'Good For,' Against 'Well-Being'" Abstract: This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well- being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G.E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there’s no philosophically useful good-for or well-being ... Read more
Title: “Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known” Abstract: In this paper, I provide an account of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” I argue that ... Read more
Event co-Hosted with ECT and FPST. Title: Extractivist epistemologies Abstract: This paper (which is very much a work in progress) will develop the concept of extractivist epistemology as a way to think through the effect of colonialism on knowing practices. Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism: seeking an epistemic resource of some sort---such as ... Read more
Climate Change, COVID-19, Justice, and Quality of Life Abstract: Justice would appear to require that those who are the principal beneficiaries of a history of economic and political behavior that has resulted in harmful global climate change should bear a correspondingly large share of the burden in contending with these harms worldwide. At the same time, ... Read more