Research

​My major project right now is Rewriting Rights, a monograph on how uncertainty affects the contours of agents' moral rights. But ​I also have a couple different open research projects, pursuing various facets of the thought that we are responsible, in some sense, for the "public meaning" of our actions.

Works in progress are thematically organized; published work (included abstracts and links) is in chronological order at the bottom of the page). Use the links immediately below to quickly jump to a project:

Moral Rights, Consent, and Self-defense

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Published work in this research project: 
Work in progress on this project:
  • a monograph, Rewriting Rights (manuscript in progress)
  • What We Owe Others Under Ignorance (draft available)
  • Epistemic Risks & Objective Rights (draft available)
  • The Case for Conventional Defensive Permissions (draft available)
What We Owe Others Under Ignorance
Many philosophers think that the individual members of a society are not blameworthy for the beliefs and expectations that they absorb from their community, in the absence of reason to suspect that they are unjust. Many also think that an individual should be sanctioned or reproached for his action only if he is in some way blameworthy for it. These two commitments together would imply that when, under the influence of bad but widely accepted social norms, a person misreads someone as consenting or attacking and so in fact assaults them while sincerely believing themselves to be acting permissibly, the community can acknowledge that the victim has been wronged, but would overstep if they directly reproached or condemned the mistaken agent’s behavior. This paper argues that when bad norms are widely endorsed, in order to adequately recognize and repair the victim’s moral injury ex post, communities must sanction the behavior of individuals whose bad-norm-conforming behavior caused injury. So, individual culpability for the mistake cannot be a necessary condition on apt social sanction. 
​Epistemic Risks & Objective Moral Rights: Beyond Subjective Permissibility
This paper argues that our understanding of objective rights must be sensitive to agents’ epistemic limitations. On one popular understanding (which I call the `full-information fact-relative' interpretation), considerations about ignorance are relevant only to the `subjective permissibility' of an act, affecting culpability but not whether an act is a rights-violation. Against this view, I argue that subjective permissibility is not an adequate answer to the problems that agent ignorance poses for the deliberative and distributive roles of moral rights. If rights are to fill the theoretical role assigned to them, they must issue fact-relative permissions that are at least somewhat sensitive to agents' evidential and epistemic limitations.
The Case for Conventional Defensive Permissions
​On most accounts, whether it is morally permissible to harm someone in self-defense depends exclusively on whether doing so is necessary to avert a genuine threat for which they are responsible, or else is justified by lesser-evil considerations. Problematically, because they can't distinguish between genuine and merely apparent threats, these accounts leave agents prone to unintentional rights-transgressions, and fail to fairly distribute the risk of suffering unjust harm. I argue that this mischaracterizes agents' defensive permissions in a social context. Taking promissory obligations as a model, I show that there is moral reason to introduce a convention to mediate and extend agents' defensive permissions. Given the uncertainty that agents must act under, there is reason to permit defense against agents to avoidably act in ways that are conventional signals of aggression, even if (unknown to the defender) the threat is merely apparent.

Predictive Inference and Belief: Personal and Political

This branch of my research centers of questions about how others' moral claims affect what epistemic and evidential policies are permissible, both for individuals and political organizations. The main applications explored are stereotype-conforming inferences, ​ethics of testimony, statistical evidence, and predictive policing.
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Published work in this research project: (scroll down for abstracts)
Works in progress in this project:
  • ​Can Predictive Hotspot Policing Be Justified? (draft)
  • The Ethical Imperative of Transparency in Policing (talk)
  • Doxastic Rights and Wrongs (talk)
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My work on statistical evidence and profiling was featured in the podcast Hi-Phi Nation (Season 3, Ep1: The PreCrime Unit). 
​Listen here
Protect, Serve, Predict?
[working paper, draft available on request]
Policing is fundamentally a project in social risk management, justified to each individual by how the practices of policing improve her prospects against suffering a rights-intrusion (from private or state actors). Given this, whether “predictive policing”—which I’ll here understand as relying on an algorithmic prediction model to guide arrests or police deployment—is morally justifiable depends not just on whether it is effective at reducing crime rates or increasing the odds that an offender will be arrested, but on whether it satisfies the relevant principles of distributive justice for risk. But so long as the most descriptively predictive variables track depressed socioeconomic conditions and antecedent victimization, using these tools will concentrate the risks posed by police activities on groups who are already disadvantaged, and so will need to provide them significant offsetting advantages if they are to be justified. Whether they do is an empirical question, but I think there is significant reason for doubt.

The Ethical Imperative of Transparency in Policing
​Authorizing an organization to harmfully interfere with or intimidate people is prima facie wrong. So what could justify it, in the case of (idealized) policing? The justifying goods of law-enforcement seem to be roughly these: preserving the rule of law, securing people from violent intrusions of their rights, and securing them from unjust domination by threats of force. I argue that these are risk-reduction benefits: the benefit received by the majority of people is not that a victimization they would otherwise have suffered is directly prevented, but that their risk of being victimized is reduced through the various activities of law-enforcement. This has several significant implications: (i) rather than viewing police as prima facie morally authorized to use the means necessary to most efficiently prevent the greatest number of victimizations, they are constrained by principles of distributive justice; (ii) theorizing about the morality of individual self-and-other defense is not a good guide to the moral permissions of police; and (iii) it is imperative not only that the laws be public, but that police policies concerning suspicious behavior, as well as patrol records and disciplinary data, be open to public scrutiny.

Doxastic Rights and Wrongs (with Maegan Fairchild)
​A number of recent debates turn on the idea that we can wrong people through our epistemic activities: through what we believe about them, or whether we believe what they say, or how much we trust their testimony.  At least at a first pass, these wrongs often seem to involve a breach of a moral entitlement; a right we have to certain kinds of epistemic treatment from others. But this diagnosis is subject to a number of objections: that the corresponding rights would (1) demand actions outside our agential control, (2) not protect a weighty moral interest, (3) be too demanding, or (4) lead to a conflict between moral and epistemic normativity. To better evaluate these objections, we need a clear characterization of the implied duties. We leverage the structure of rights to do this. We can illuminate the shape a duty must take (as well as the contours of a right) by carefully characterizing the underlying interest it serves. While we might not have weighty interests in others’ isolated token mental states, there are a number of further epistemic and interpersonal goods that (i) we do have a strong moral interest in securing and (ii) which depend on others being disposed to respond to or see us in specific ways, but (iii) which are neither secured nor lost by any one-off instance of treatment. We suggest that the most plausible content of a moral duty to believe someone is to have a fair epistemic policy.  We argue that these policies can be helpfully analogized to fair procedural rules, and close by considering some upshots for theorizing about the ethics of belief.

published & forthcoming work

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​Department of Philosophy
University of Michigan
2215 Angell Hall, 435 South State St
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003