RESEARCH PROGRAM
​My areas of specialization are metaethics and epistemology. I’m particularly interested in the social origins of normativity. My work explores the requirements of morality and of epistemic rationality to which we hold one another accountable.
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Where do these norms derive their authority? I think that all normativity is fundamentally instrumental in nature. This means that when it comes to explaining normative authority, the buck stops with us - Doing what we ought is ultimately a matter of effectively pursuing the ends or goals we have set for ourselves. Yet not all of our reasons are reasons of self-interested practical rationality. On my view, the demands of morality and of epistemic rationality arise in connection with the collectively held aims of different sorts of groups of which we are members, like societies or epistemic communities. Through collective endeavors, we obligate one another.
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My most recent work has been focused on articulating and defending a “collective” version of epistemic instrumentalism. In general, epistemic instrumentalism is the view that the demands of epistemic rationality are a special case of the requirements of instrumental (or goal-directed) rationality as opposed to a sui generis source of demands regarding appropriate beliefs. Epistemic instrumentalism has been particularly influential in the philosophy of science and among other theorists who wish to offer an account of epistemic normativity that is compatible with naturalism. (The alternative view about epistemic norms has a lot in common with metaethical moral realism.) In my work, I argue that collective epistemic instrumentalism avoids key objections to traditional versions of the view and offers further advantages when it comes to explaining our standing to hold others epistemically accountable.
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I've been thinking more lately about how we do (and don't) hold AI accountable for misinformation. I think we can draw some interesting lessons about the nature of epistemic blame and of blameworthiness in general.
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I also have ongoing interests in moral objectivity and relativism, as well as in the epistemology of moral beliefs. I'm currently working on one project on ethical intuitionism and the realism/antirealism debate in metaethics.
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LIST OF PUBLICATIONS BY TOPIC
I. Epistemic Normativity: Collective Epistemic Instrumentalism
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- "Could Our Epistemic Reasons Be Collective Practical Reasons?"
(Noûs, 55(4), pp. 842-862, 2021)
I argue that by drawing upon the idea of epistemic communities with investigative goals, we can account for epistemic reasons in an instrumental manner. The resulting view is immune to the main objections to epistemic instrumentalism emphasized by Thomas Kelly (2003), as well as to epistemic analogues of familiar metaethical objections to moral realism.
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- "Epistemic instrumentalism and the problem of epistemic blame"
(Synthese, vol. 204, no. 110, 2024)
I argue that my own collective version of epistemic instrumentalism is uniquely poised to vindicate some of our intuitions about the appropriateness of a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. Traditional forms of epistemic instrumentalism face significant difficulties (in virtue of the defining commitments of the view) explaining how one could have the standing to direct epistemic blame towards others.
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- I'm also contributing a piece on "Instrumentalism about epistemic rationality" to the forthcoming 3rd edition of the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Ed. Kurt Sylvan.
(Email for manuscript.)
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II. Moral Normativity: Moral Relativism and Group Aims/Group Agency
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- “Group Agency Meets Metaethics: How to Craft a More Compelling Form of Normative Relativism”
(Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 15, Ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, 2020, Oxford University Press, 219-240)
I show how we can draw upon the claim that societies have "ends" in order to formulate a novel version of moral relativism. The view avoids key problems faced by well-known versions of relativism while still answering to the same metaethical motivations (such as epistemological arguments) that typically attract philosophers to those views in the first place.
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I'm contributing an essay explaining and defending the view for The Oxford Handbook of Meta-Ethics, Eds. David Copp and Connie Rosati, forth. with OUP.
(Email for manuscript.)
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(2023, in a special volume of Inquiry on reductionism about group agency, eds. Olof Leffler and Lars Moen)
According to the form of moral relativism that I defend, we can sensibly attribute ends, and thus reasons, directly to societies. This paper draws upon a functionalist approach from the philosophy of mind to provide an independent defense of the claim that we can attribute functional states to societies that play roles analogous to those of ends or motivational states in individual persons. The paper concludes by reflecting on some broader implications regarding what it is to be an agent and to possess ends. For instance, one need not be consciously aware of one’s ends.
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III. Epistemological Objections to Value Realism
(and Broader Implications for our Understanding of Epistemic Justification)
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- "Bad bootstrapping: the problem with third-factor replies to the Darwinian Dilemma for moral realism"
(Philosophical Studies, 177, pp. 2115-2128, 2020)
I defend Street’s (2006) 'Darwinian Dilemma' for the value realist against the third-factor replies on behalf of realism popularized by Enoch (2010, 2011), Skarsaune (2011) and Wielenberg (2010, 2014). I argue that these replies are question-begging. I do so by drawing upon the epistemic literature on bootstrapping, which is an intuitively illegitimate form of reasoning.​
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- I'm also contributing a piece on "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments" to the 3rd edition of the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology.
(Email for manuscript.)
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