I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. I work in moral philosophy. Much of my research pursues the idea that we might come to better understand much of morality by taking a careful look at how people decide together what to do.
Before coming to Toronto, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D in philosophy at MIT in 2017. Supervisors: Kieran Setiya, Stephen Darwall, and Julia Markovits
Both contextualist and relativist solutions to the faultless disagreement problem clash with our ... more Both contextualist and relativist solutions to the faultless disagreement problem clash with our intuitions: contextualism, with the intuition that two people arguing about a matter oftaste are in fact disagreeing; and relativism, with the intuition that the truth of a proposition is independent of who is evaluating it. In this paper, I will outline a solution that explains our intuition of disagreement without clashing with our intuitions about truth. I will do this by proposing a definition of propositions as ideally clarified assertoric content, having one absolute truth-value that does not vary across any contexts. I will argue that this definition is plausible, that it best serves the purposes of philosophy, and that it best solves the problem of faultless disagreement.
If I promise to pick you up at the airport, I thereby become obligated to do so. But this is not ... more If I promise to pick you up at the airport, I thereby become obligated to do so. But this is not the only way I could undertake this obligation. If I offer to pick you up, and you accept my offer, I become obligated to pick you up in much the same way. I would also undertake similar obligations if you asked me to pick you up and I accepted your request, or if we made an agreement that I will pick you up at the airport and in exchange you’ll buy me dinner. Why are the normative effects of accepted offers, accepted requests, and agreements so similar to those of promises? I argue that theorists of promising need to answer this question, and so they need to pay attention to offers, requests, and agreements. On the theory I defend, promises, offers, requests, and agreements have such similar normative effects because they all result in joint decisions between the relevant parties. I argue that this ‘joint decision view’ provides an attractive explanation of the similarities and differen...
Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do. In this dissertatio... more Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do. In this dissertation, I argue that several speech acts that we can use to alter our moral obligations - promises, offers, requests, demands, commands, and agreements - are moves within joint practical deliberation. The dissertation begins by investigating joint practical deliberation. The resulting account implies that joint deliberation is more flexible than we usually recognize, in two ways. First, we can make joint decisions not only about what we will do together, but also about what you or I will do alone. Second, we can deliberate by means of two distinct methods: propose-and-ratify, in which a proposed joint decision must be explicitly accepted to come into effect, and propose-and-challenge, in which a proposed joint decision comes into force unless it is explicitly challenged. Varying these parameters generates a botany of different kinds of proposals we can make within joint deliberation. When we ...
The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefor... more The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefore, messages containing negated concepts can ironically prime mental representations and evaluations that are opposite to those intended. We hypothesized that the subtle presentation of a negated concept (e.g., “no smoking”) would activate ironic motivational orientations as well. We tested this hypothesis in a public health context. Smokers viewed photographs in which no-smoking signs were either inconspicuously embedded (prime) or edited out (control). Primed smokers showed amplified automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli, but not toward smoking-unrelated stimuli. Since passive priming effects generally serve to facilitate forms of action, not inhibit them, anti-smoking and other public health campaigns may ironically increase the very behaviors they seek to reduce.
Both contextualist and relativist solutions to the faultless disagreement problem clash with our ... more Both contextualist and relativist solutions to the faultless disagreement problem clash with our intuitions: contextualism, with the intuition that two people arguing about a matter oftaste are in fact disagreeing; and relativism, with the intuition that the truth of a proposition is independent of who is evaluating it. In this paper, I will outline a solution that explains our intuition of disagreement without clashing with our intuitions about truth. I will do this by proposing a definition of propositions as ideally clarified assertoric content, having one absolute truth-value that does not vary across any contexts. I will argue that this definition is plausible, that it best serves the purposes of philosophy, and that it best solves the problem of faultless disagreement.
If I promise to pick you up at the airport, I thereby become obligated to do so. But this is not ... more If I promise to pick you up at the airport, I thereby become obligated to do so. But this is not the only way I could undertake this obligation. If I offer to pick you up, and you accept my offer, I become obligated to pick you up in much the same way. I would also undertake similar obligations if you asked me to pick you up and I accepted your request, or if we made an agreement that I will pick you up at the airport and in exchange you’ll buy me dinner. Why are the normative effects of accepted offers, accepted requests, and agreements so similar to those of promises? I argue that theorists of promising need to answer this question, and so they need to pay attention to offers, requests, and agreements. On the theory I defend, promises, offers, requests, and agreements have such similar normative effects because they all result in joint decisions between the relevant parties. I argue that this ‘joint decision view’ provides an attractive explanation of the similarities and differen...
Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do. In this dissertatio... more Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do. In this dissertation, I argue that several speech acts that we can use to alter our moral obligations - promises, offers, requests, demands, commands, and agreements - are moves within joint practical deliberation. The dissertation begins by investigating joint practical deliberation. The resulting account implies that joint deliberation is more flexible than we usually recognize, in two ways. First, we can make joint decisions not only about what we will do together, but also about what you or I will do alone. Second, we can deliberate by means of two distinct methods: propose-and-ratify, in which a proposed joint decision must be explicitly accepted to come into effect, and propose-and-challenge, in which a proposed joint decision comes into force unless it is explicitly challenged. Varying these parameters generates a botany of different kinds of proposals we can make within joint deliberation. When we ...
The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefor... more The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefore, messages containing negated concepts can ironically prime mental representations and evaluations that are opposite to those intended. We hypothesized that the subtle presentation of a negated concept (e.g., “no smoking”) would activate ironic motivational orientations as well. We tested this hypothesis in a public health context. Smokers viewed photographs in which no-smoking signs were either inconspicuously embedded (prime) or edited out (control). Primed smokers showed amplified automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli, but not toward smoking-unrelated stimuli. Since passive priming effects generally serve to facilitate forms of action, not inhibit them, anti-smoking and other public health campaigns may ironically increase the very behaviors they seek to reduce.
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