At the broadest level my research concerns social justice. Much of my work focuses on thinking about the injustice of certain kinds of social orders, most often hierarchical ones. I’ve worked on questions ranging from political authority, democratic theory, distributive justice, public reason liberalism, and reparations. Some of my work takes me into topics in other disciplines, among which have been sociological debates about the evolution of status behaviors and the social psychology of authoritarianism.
Before coming to Virginia, I completed my PhD at the University of Arizona. The title of my dissertation is Equality and the Morality of Social Status. The claim at the heart of the dissertation is that there is a distinctive kind of social status relation, which I call public social status, within which persons ought to be equals.
Papers If you are interested in a paper and cannot access it, please feel free to email me and I will send it your way. My email: [email protected]
"What is Authoritarianism? A Justificatory Account," European Journal of Political Theory, Forthcoming All sorts of things, ranging from individual personalities, social movements, political parties, or institutions, are aptly called authoritarian. In virtue of what are such phenomena authoritarian? I advance a general conception of authoritarianism according to which authoritarianism concerns the justification of unconstrained impositions of power for the sake of collective benefit.
"Reparations, Recognition, and the Restoration of Relational Equality,"Free and Equal (2025) Should people alive today bear some cost to provide compensation for past injustice? I argue that they should for the sake of undoing certain kinds of hierarchies and providing assurance to persons who are, and have been, treated as social and moral inferiors over time.
"Reciprocity and the Rule of Law," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, (2025) Fair play theories of political obligation hold that one has a duty to reciprocate the benefits one receives from others' compliance with the law by complying in return. Recent criticisms of the view maintain that individuals have discretion in choosing how to discharge their debts of reciprocity, such that there is a gap in the fair-play account. I reply to this criticism and argue that reciprocation in kind by complying with the law is necessary to satisfy the conditions of the rule of law.
"Equality, Efficiency, and Hierarchy in the Workplace," Economics and Philosophy, (2024) Egalitarians argue that workplaces should be organized non-hierarchically. Such views may be found objectionable because hierarchies are highly efficient forms of social organization. I reply to such efficiency objections by arguing that it can be worthwhile to trade-off efficiency on the margins for greater equality in cooperative relations. I defend the view that while egalitarians have reason to tolerate some degree of hierarchy, the prevailing hierarchical organization of cooperation privileges efficiency over equality to an intolerable degree.
"Justice, Reciprocity, and the Boundaries of State Authority," Journal of Political Philosophy (2022) I propose a hybrid theory of political authority according to which some state is authoritative only if it is sufficiently just, and because citizens bear duties of reciprocity toward one another concerning compliance with the state. This fair-play functionalist hybrid maintains a commitment to basic intuitions that motivated functionalism, but avoids common problem cases for functionalism, such as the particularity problem or the problem of unilateral secession. Fair play functionalism also has an appealing and simple mechanism for explaining how historical injustices can fade over time.
"Relational Egalitarianism and Democracy," Journal of Moral Philosophy (2021) Relational egalitarians believe that democratic institutions are justified because relating as equals requires equality of political power. You might object that we can relate as equals despite there being inequalities of power between us. I develop an account of social status and argue that based on available sociological theory and evidence, we have good reason to hold that inequalities of power will cause inequalities of social status. I conclude that the relational egalitarian justification of democracy is vindicated.
"Adjudicating Distributive Disagreement," Synthese (2021) Get the model code here What kinds of voting rules work best for resolving disagreement about distributive justice? This paper a develops a computational model to address this question, with the added twist that agents adjust preferences in light of disappointment to be more selfish.
"Democratic Public Justification," Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2020) It would seem natural to think that democracy would be a reliable means to track what laws or policies that are publicly justified. But why? I examine the mechanisms by which democratic institutions would choose publicly justified outcomes, and argue that they might not be as reliable as first thought. I go on to argue that such unreliability can ameliorated through the use of lotteries in democracy.
"The Epistemic Limits of Shared Reasons," European Journal of Philosophy (2020) The hallmark of theories of public reason is acceptance of reasonable pluralism. I argue that reasonable pluralism spells trouble for theories that hold public reasons must be shared. Whatever features of individuals that give rise to reasonable pluralism will also give rise to pluralism about public reason.