Research
A unifying thread in my work is the idea that the political is interpersonal: anything done politically is always something done by persons to other persons. This both raises special ethical considerations that constrain what we may do politically, and can inform us as to what avenues are available for political change. This leads me to interests such as those in my dissertation and M.A. thesis (criminal punishment, moral repair, and rights theory), along with others, such as political strategy (and its ethics), war, and reparations for historic injustice.
Methodologically, I take philosophy to be a practice of reflective self-understanding about the human experience. Doing this well requires more than what can be gleaned from philosophy alone, and so my work also draws on (and engages) fields like economics and sociology.
Below, you can find abstracts and summaries of publications, dissertation chapters, and works in progress. Please feel free to reach out about anything mentioned there.
Refereed Publications
Expand for publication information and summaries.
Links to pdfs are available at the bottom of each summary.
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Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 103, No. 2, 509–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2024.2403771
Two-tiered mixed theories of punishment hold that legislatures should act according to consequentialism, but the judiciary should act according to retributivism. A major motivation for these theories is wanting to preserve the idea that punishment is ultimately justified on consequentialist grounds, without falling prey to the Punishing the Innocent objection. Yet this benefit is illusory. While two-tiered mixed theories successfully avoid the Punishing the Innocent objection narrowly construed, they do not successfully escape the point behind it. This is because cases can be constructed with the same problems as those used to describe the classic Punishing the Innocent objection, just bumped up to the legislature.
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Public Affairs Quarterly, Volume 39, No. 2, 164–183.
It is often assumed that politics is just about the state and what it does. Here I argue for a much broader view, in which politics can include activity that has nothing to do with getting the state to behave differently, by suggesting several ways in which the seemingly apolitical activity of entrepreneurship can fall into three broad categories of political action. The first is in establishing institutions or practices that help guarantee some demand of justice. The second is mitigating and circumventing state injustice. The third is in building a foundation for future action. After that, I discuss two benefits to entrepreneurial politics over state-mediated alternatives, both of which relate to dealing with the constraints of prevailing ideology. The first is that entrepreneurship allows those who are alert to alternative political possibilities to act on that alertness without first overcoming ideological barriers. This argument draws on Israel Kirzner’s account of entrepreneurship’s equilibrating function. The second point builds upon Joseph Schumpeter’s account of its disequilibrating function: successful entrepreneurial action can destroy existing ideological assumptions about what is possible.
(Read here. This paper builds on my previous paper with Billy Christmas, “Methodological Anarchism," mentioned under Invited Publications below.) -
Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence, Volume 3, No. 2, 249–273.
Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan’s data in Why Civil Resistance Works suggest that nonviolent resistance is much more effective than violent resistance. In that same data, however, they show that campaigns of violent resistance have been much more common than those of nonviolent resistance — and while nonviolent resistance has recently overtaken violent resistance, this has been alongside greater toleration of violence within nonviolent campaigns (which Chenoweth and Stephan argue should make those campaigns less effective.) This gives us a puzzle of apparently senseless violence, which may lead some to infer on rational choice grounds that Chenoweth and Stephan’s case is not as strong as it appears, and that this violence is not actually senseless.
I offer a different rational choice explanation for this finding, which is compatible with Chenoweth and Stephan’s broader analysis. As they argue, the fact that it is much easier to participate in nonviolent resistance makes such campaigns more effective. Yet this advantage for nonviolent campaigns over violent campaigns reverses when we consider the positions of potential violent campaigns and potential nonviolent campaigns that have not yet gotten off the ground. In that strategic position, the costliness of participation in violence makes its preparation a costly signal for a movement's seriousness. This makes it easier for such campaigns to get off the ground by helping them secure their most committed potential recruits. After outlining this explanation, I offer some practical ways that potential campaigns can make participation costlier in their early stages so that they can more easily signal seriousness and reach the level of a full-scale campaign.
Invited
Publications
Expand for publication information and summaries.
Please feel free to reach out for any of these.
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Forthcoming for an edited anthology for Rowman & Littlefield the social philosophy and political economy of James Buchanan, edited by Rosolino Candela, Alain Marciano & Mikayla Novak.
In The Reason of Rules, Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan argue for what I call a “Rules First Theory of Justice.” On their Rules First view, rules are prior to justice, and justice is simply obedience to the most fundamental agreed-upon rules. I argue against this view by appeal to another reason for rules provided by Brennan and Buchanan: protection from arbitrary power. Without a standard of justice over and above existing rules, rules will not have the stability to provide this protection. This is because the attitude towards existing rules encouraged by the Rules First approach enables two paths to arbitrary power from well-designed constitutions: ambiguities resolving through elite-favoring interpretive drift, and acquiescence to longstanding elite violations of rules. Both paths allow for the unfortunate result of rendering arbitrary power necessarily just, with disobedience to that arbitrary power now unjust. The first path, additionally, can get there without any steps that the Rules First approach can even call unjust. I then offer natural rights frameworks and relational egalitarianism as possible alternatives for better serving Brennan and Buchanan’s motivations for the Rules First theory.
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In Liberty and Security in an Anarchical World, Volume 2: Exit -- Secession, Non-Westphalian Sovereignties, and Interstate Federalism (Palgrave MacMillan, edited by Brandon Christiansen)
Libertarian arguments against military interventions tend to be couched in terms of non-aggression: just as one person should not use violence against another except in defense, nations should not use violence against other nations except in defense. Intervention-friendly libertarians object that this appeal to non-aggression is misapplied, given libertarianism's commitment to moral individualism: what matters is that individuals are not aggressed against, and if a nation's government is aggressing against individuals, it is not aggression to respond to that with force. I first argue that the interventionists are correct on this theoretical point: nations are not sovereign, individuals are sovereign. Yet the rest of the paper argues for noninterventionism, because properly respecting individual sovereignty should lead us to oppose military interventions in the real world.
The first reason for this is that the most plausible justifications for collateral damage are unlikely to cover the extent found in real world interventions, especially given those interventions' low probability of success. The second is that the decision to intervene is not the decision to mechanically apply a particular amount of force at one moment, but to direct a large number of people to repeatedly deploy force over an extended period of time in a particular area. Subjecting people to this chaos deprives them of liberty regardless of whether their person or property is ever actually hit with violence. Third, that same chaos makes atrocities near-inevitable, and so the decision to intervene must be a decision to knowingly enable atrocities. This renders a hard distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello ideological in the pejorative sense, as what will meet the standards for merely "justifying war" may not justify the sort of thing war actually involves. Finally, the underappreciated dangers in having a standing army and accepting a general policy of regular intervention give us reason to reject even interventions that might be justified when taken in isolation. This is because the nature of state actors' decision-making is such that rejecting the possible intervention at hand may be their only opportunity to steer away from a general policy of intervention.
Once the main point against interventionism is made, I suggest that many of these same points will apply (albeit in a weaker way) even to defensive wars. This takes us beyond noninterventionism to a more thoroughgoing anti-war position. However, I also offer some reasons for not describing this position as "pacifist," as this suggests opposition to all organized violence, and some forms may much more easily overcome these challenges.
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In Political Process: New Perspectives on the Virginia and Bloomington Schools (Rowman & Littlefield, edited by Donald Boudreaux, Christopher J. Coyne & Brian Kogelmann.)
Virginia Political Economy is characterized by a distinctive public choice analysis of the pathologies in existing political institutions and the constitutional political economy approach to reforming institutions. Unfortunately, the extent to which public choice is correct in its assessment of existing institutions, it will thereby render the recommendations of constitutional political economy harder to reach. Thus, in virtue of this meta-problem, Virginia Political Economy risks concluding in its own irrelevance. I consider and reject some possible answers to this meta-problem, before offering my own: a “constitutional political economy from below” aimed at building alternative institutions outside of the state and its pathologies.
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(2024.) The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 28, No. 4: 553-565.
(Special issue on Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty.)
In “The State,” Rothbard gives us a picture of the state as a predatory, exploitative institution. Notably, this chapter comes early in the book, before his analysis of particular state functions. I offer a suggestion for why this is so, and what role the chapter plays in Rothbard’s larger argument for anarchism: this functional critique of the state will lead us to expect particular patterns of state predation and dysfunction as the usual case, rather than exceptions of failure from a basically cooperative enterprise rationally adopted for mutual advantage. Moreover, seeing the state as a fundamentally predatory institution will also undercut the assumptions of some leading philosophical arguments for its legitimacy. I also highlight some practical risks in adopting this picture of the state, including some speculation as to how it might have led him to underappreciate the dangers in his own alliances with highly illiberal political movements.
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(2022.) Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Routledge, edited by Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson: 427-440.)
This chapter surveys libertarian thought on the question of “historic injustice,” which is when serious injustice goes unresolved for many years. After some historical discussion of early libertarian writing on the subject, I turn to the contemporary debate surrounding reparations for slavery. After outlining three arguments common among libertarians for reparations, common reasons for skepticism are also discussed. Then, special focus is given to the topic of land theft. In particular, I home in on what I call the “Poisoning Problem,” or the idea that natural rights approaches to property fail because so much of actually-existing property is founded on conquest. In the conclusion, I highlight two areas where libertarian writing on historic injustice is relatively quiet compared with broader writing on these topics: reparations of a less material sort and transitional injustice. Throughout this chapter, I typically refer to American slavery and land theft, but the discussion is meant to apply much further than those two cases.
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(2020.) Routledge Handbook on Anarchy & Anarchist Thought, coauthored with Billy Christmas. (Routledge, edited by Gary Chartier & Chad Van Schoelandt: 53-75.)
It is commonly assumed that questions about politics and justice are questions about what the state should do. Since anarchists all seek to abolish the state, yet still have many (fierce) disagreements about politics and justice between themselves, this suggests a methodological difference implicit in how anarchists think about politics and justice compared to everyone else. We call the common assumption “the Policy Framework,” and argue against it in favor of what we call “Methodological Anarchism,” which takes politics and justice to be about social institutions and social practices more generally. On the Methodological Anarchist approach, substantive comparative institutional analysis would be necessary to move from any claim of justice to whether the state should thereby be involved. After making these theoretical points, we turn to practice, as Methodological Anarchism also opens the door for direct action, or bypassing state-mediated forms of politics to directly establish or act upon institutions or practices that might effect or impinge upon justice.
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(2019). Molinari Review, Vol. 1, No. 2: 9-23.
In effect: “Why I Am Not an Anarcho-Communist.” I argue that markets provide an important structural check against various forms of social domination that are likely to pollute social anarchist economic alternatives. This is both because of the exit markets provide for individuals to any social arrangement, and the dynamics of social plasticity created by those exit options.
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(2019). The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom (Lexington Books, edited by Roger E. Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra & Edward W. Younkins: 307-324.)
Immediatists, among libertarians, hold that all state activity that violates rights ought to be immediately rather than gradually abolished (and any incremental moves away from that aggression must also be accepted.) For immediatists who are also anarchists, this means that the state ought be immediately (rather than gradually) abolished.
Unsurprisingly, this position is often taken to be a bit absurd. However, I offer an interpretation in which the view is defensible, and then defend it. In short, immediatism flows from something core to libertarianism: an understanding of the political as interpersonal. Laws are just patterns of persons behaving towards other persons in a particular way, as is the state itself. If it is impermissible for a person to treat another person in the way that any such pattern requires, then each person involved in that pattern ought to immediately stop doing it. If everyone were to immediately fulfill their individual obligations, then, laws violating rights (and perhaps the state itself) would be immediately abolished.
Immediatism is thus tied to an understanding of politics as continuous with the rest of social life. I argue further that its apparent theoretical implausibility and practical dangers come when that context is dropped, and the goal of “immediate abolition” is taken to be something more like a legislative act — which for anarchist versions, at least, is not even coherent. Accordingly, the actual path of political action morally guided by immediatism will still look quite gradual.
Dissertation
Decriminalizing Crime: Accountability Without the Retributive Ritual
My dissertation explores whether something would be morally missing without criminal punishment even if alternatives “worked” on their own terms. I argue that expressive retributivism rightly points to a non-consequentialist moral purpose served by criminal punishment, that of providing moral accountability through condemning wrongdoing and vindicating victims. However, when we more fully understand the moral mechanics of this process, we also see that it holds no necessary connection to criminal punishment, and may be achieved by abolitionist alternatives. Retributivism, thus, cannot serve as a purely a priori justification of punishment, and instead rests on substantive criminological assumptions. Along the way, I also consider broader moral questions like desert and the contingency of morally-significant forms of expression.
(Committee: Elizabeth Anderson (chair), Renée Jørgensen, Gabriel Mendlow (Law), David Sussman (Indiana).
(Expand for chapter summaries. Click here for the entire dissertation.)
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Desertism is the view that 1) people ought to get what they deserve, and 2) that this is informative enough to give us a self-standing argument for particular practices and institutions. Desertist forms of retributivism probably have the best claim to being a folk theory of criminal punishment.
This first chapter argues against desertism more generally, by presenting a dilemma. Desertism may take well-being itself (positive or negative) to be what is deserved. In those cases, the dealing out of that well-being or suffering would serve as a self-standing reason for some institution or practice, but this would be perverse. In other cases, the objects of desert are more fine-grained (e.g. deserving a particular burden or particular benefit, rather than burdens or benefits as-such.) Many such claims will be not only non-perverse, but true — yet only as shorthand for some other, non-desertist consideration. Thus, the two components of desertism can’t be jointly satisfied.
The perversity horn of the dilemma draws on the common anti-retributivist revulsion towards the idea that it might be good in itself to make people suffer. While this revulsion is commonly felt, it is rarely argued from, because it is hard to do so in a non-question-begging way. To avoid begging the question, I stress the utter uniqueness of desertism’s non-instrumental claim to the goodness of suffering itself, and that (in all other contexts), seeking that suffering for its own sake would be taken as perverse. This puts the burden on the desertist retributivist to show that their case is different. Moreover, unpacking the anti-retributivist revulsion also puts pressure on positive desert, as it is hard to formulate an idea of positive desert in terms of welfare itself that does not also require cases of negatively valuing the supradeserved welfare of anyone but the most deserving.
The triviality horn of the dilemma first explains how desert language commonly functions as shorthand for other considerations, and then stresses some dangers in mistakenly treating that shorthand as a self-standing consideration of its own, over and above the considerations for which it is shorthand.
In Chapter 2, I give an account of what desert claims serve as shorthand for in the criminal context.
(Included in the dissertation linked at the bottom of the description to the left.)
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Expressive retributivists contend that the purpose of punishment is to socially realize the value of individuals by condemning wrongdoing against them. This helps to explain why an offender's punishment seems owed to their victim. So too does that same idea help to explain the importance of apology, moral repair, and broader forms of social condemnation.
While this idea is compelling, it is also a bit opaque, in terms of what it means for someone's moral value to be "socially realized," why this matters, and why it involves inflicting harm upon offenders. This chapter offers an account of that idea, why it matters, and how these diverse social practices might work towards it. Spelling out its moral mechanics, moreover, helps us to see how it might be achieved in other ways.
In short, I take the idea of socially-realized value to be a process of embodying a person's social worth, by which I mean the treatment they are entitled to within the norms by which they live. Sanctioning responses both honor that social worth by treating the person as if they are someone who may not be treated a particular way, and promote it by bolstering or pushing norms in a particular direction.
The goal is for each person's social worth to match their moral worth, by which I mean the treatment to which they are actually morally entitled. This matters because our participation in and identification with a given community is itself expressive. A community is partly constituted by its norms, and so full, unreserved identification with a community that affords unjustly low social worth to some persons expresses disrespect against those persons. To participate in a given community without reservation or moral compromise, then, we must ensure that the social worth of all matches moral worth.
To say that criminal punishment serves this purpose is not (on its own) a moral justification of the practice, only a moral explanation. As a moral explanation, it identifies a worthwhile moral purpose served by the practice, and spells out the mechanics of how that purpose is served.
Such explanations can enable critique by demystifying the moral value of practices, such that we can see how that value might be achieved some other way without the problems of how we currently serve it. I first show how such a critique might go by examining honor-based practices of revenge (which can also be morally explained in terms of social worth), and then motion towards how this same line of critique might be leveled against criminal punishment.
That potential demystification is explored further in Chapter 5. Here, I briefly identify two points at which criminal punishment's purpose of embodying social worth is institutionally open, by which I mean that it might be served some alternative way. Since the core function of punishment on this picture is expressive, the first point of potential institutional openness is in the mode of expression (i.e., whether it need have the familiar features of criminal punishment). The second is in the agents of expression (i.e., whether it need be carried out through the state's criminal legal system.) That first point of potential openness motivates Chapter 3, and the second will motivate future work.
(Included in the dissertation linked at the bottom of the description to the left.)
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Many arguments in normative philosophy hinge upon what some institution, practice, or behavior expresses. For instance, as discussed in Chapter 2, the expressive retributivist holds that punishment is needed to adequately condemn wrongdoing. Similar claims can be found in topics as varied as debates about commodification, racial profiling, democracy, speech law, and environmental protection. All such arguments face some variation of the Alternative Modes Objection, which says that what something expresses is partly a matter of convention, and so (given some other considerations) instead of accepting or rejecting the practice in question, we should just change our conventions about what that practice expresses. Yet whether it is feasible or appropriate to adjust conventions in a given case is a further question, and thus authors' intuitions will differ about the Alternative Modes Objection's applicability to a particular case.
To help navigate these disputes, I offer a framework for assessing our expressive vocabularies, by which I mean the set of conventions by which we attach moral meaning (positive or negative) to various practices. Potential expressive vocabularies may be judged both in terms of their feasibility and fit.
A proposed part of an expressive vocabulary will be feasible to the extent that it can actually be self-understood within a given community as having the suggested meaning. These conditions for feasibility break down further into intelligibility, credibility, and stability.
A proposed part of an expressive vocabulary will be normatively fitting to the extent that adopting that convention would make sense to adopt if you genuinely held the values motivating concern about the expression in question. For instance, forms of punishment that are actively criminogenic will be ill-fitting as a rejection of criminal wrongdoing. Within a feasible set of possible expressive vocabularies, we ought to favor those that are more fitting, as the choice of a less fitting expressive vocabulary itself expresses a lack of sincerity in our commitment to the relevant values.
(Included in the dissertation linked at the bottom of the description to the left.)
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The basic retributivist intuition is simple yet powerful. When one person clearly violates another's rights without excuse, and is not punished, it seems that there has been an injustice. In many cases, there seems to be an injustice even when the wrongdoer is punished, but not punished in a particular way (e.g. incarcerated.)
Rather than flatly rejecting this intuition, or offering a debunking explanation (which would just explain it in terms of some mistake), I offer what I call a translation argument. In the sense I mean it, a translation argument accepts the principle to which our intuition points, but offers a different interpretation of that principle. Such translations thus accept that the intuition holds genuine evidential value, but debunk a particular interpretation of that evidence.
The retributivist interpretation is translated thus: what jumps out to us in the retributivist's favored cases is the need for moral accountability. Given our existing conventions, moral accountability for certain sorts of serious wrongdoing requires criminal punishment, and often incarceration in particular. It is thus true that the failure to punish the wrongdoer in such a case is a failure of moral accountability, and so damages the victim's social worth. Yet this is just a feature of the expressive vocabulary we happen to have, and so does not speak against the abolitionist rejection of that expressive vocabulary. The retributivist's mistake is in misreading our judgment of how to apply our existing practices of accountability to a given case as a judgment about those practices of accountability themselves.
Using the frameworks provided in the previous two chapters, I argue for the plausibility of alternative forms of accountability. The abolitionist, then, can agree that the response to wrongdoing requires accountability, and that this puts constraints on which responses will be adequate -- while also denying that this renders alternatives to criminal punishment inadequate.
(Included in the dissertation linked at the bottom of the description to the left.)
Works in Progress
Expand for (tentative!) summaries, along with whether a draft, or more free-form “thoughts” are available upon request.
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Expressive retributivists offer a compelling moral purpose for criminal justice: providing a system of moral accountability by which criminal wrongdoing can be condemned and victims vindicated, thereby correcting damage to the victim's dignity. Rather than discussing expressive retributivism as a justificatory rationale for criminal punishment, I consider how it might help us to understand pathologies with real world systems of criminal punishment.
I outline two types of retributive failure, by which I mean ways in which a particular system of accountability ends up undermining the aims behind having a system of accountability, even without any instances of retributive error (punishing the innocent, punishing beyond proportionality, or failing to punish the guilty). The first is when a system of accountability can create moral injury of the same kind it is meant to rectify, and the second is when it diminishes its expressive power by overuse.
I then argue that both types of retributive failure are present in American mass incarceration, with each effect worsened further by retributive error. It might be thought that the two types of retributive failure can't coincide, since the first type occurs through punishment's expressive power, and the second through losing that expressive power. This apparent tension is resolved when we recognize that expressive power can differ between audiences, as seen in the example of American mass incarceration.
(A draft of this paper's ancestor is available upon request, along with some thoughts about how this version of the idea is different from that ancestor and why. Slides available upon request.)
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To alienate a right is to voluntarily give it up, to forfeit it is to lose it through wrongdoing. I defend the claim that neither alienation nor forfeiture can occur with natural rights (those that one has in virtue of being a person).
The reason is straightforward: if you have the right in virtue of being a person, and you're still a person (as you would be after attempting to alienate your rights, or after wrongdoing), you must still have the right. While variations on this argument are common, they are often rejected as conflating the conditions for initially obtaining a right and those for retaining it.
My intervention is to suggest that those who find this straightforward argument compelling and those who don't have an implicit, unacknowledged disagreement about the relationship between natural rights and personhood. In short, those who accept the straightforward argument take personhood to ground natural rights, whereas those who reject it take personhood to merely cause natural rights.
I then consider and reject some alternative, additional grounding conditions for natural rights (which could make natural rights alienable or forfeitable even if the relationship is one of grounding), along with some intuitive worries for inalienability and nonforfeitability of natural rights. I conclude by giving some tentative reasons to think the relationship is one of grounding, and not merely causal.
(Draft available upon request.)
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Radical political goals are those that seek to fundamentally reshape institutions and practices in such a way that would have pervasive effects on all of society. I consider two possible challenges for such proposals, one normative and one practical.
The first is the conservative challenge, which worries that the conjunction of our poor epistemic position with respect to the actual effects of radical change and the pervasiveness of those effects means that radical change necessarily risks imposing massive harm. The second is the challenge of ideology, which suggests that the ubiquity of that which the radical seeks to change will make changing it near-unthinkable.
I argue that these twin challenges will pose a problem for radicals who adopt strategies of either reform (attempting to change a political system from within the accepted channels of that same system) or revolution (attempting to destroy one political system and replace it with another, all at once). These considerations give radicals a reason to prefer a variety of strategies that have been called "prefigurative politics," "direct action," and "interstitial politics," which directly attempt to build the radical alternative without acting on the existing system (either through reform or revolution.) Experimentation from the ground-up creates less risk, and provides more information for how the alternative might function well, which responds to the conservative challenge. It gives radicals something to point to, and eventually creates familiarity with the alternative, thus helping them deal with the hurdle of ideology.
As an example of this approach, I focus on efforts by police and prison abolitionists in developing alternative methods for dealing with interpersonal wrongdoing (both preventively and in response.)
(Happy to discuss the ideas here via email. Slides available upon request.)
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In successful tort suits, tortfeasors must pay damages to plaintiffs. If the plaintiff refuses, that restitution may be forcibly extracted from them. This involves violence against the tortfeasor after the plaintiff's rights have already been violated. Non-defensive violence requires justification, and so there is a problem of tort restitution, just as there is a problem of punishment. (Additionally, many penal abolitionists object to punishment on the grounds that it involves non-defensive violence, while also relying on tort restitution to respond to wrongdoing -- and so this problem is especially pressing for them.)
I offer the following answer to this problem: the violence involved in tort restitution is reducible to defensive violence (at least when punitive damages are excluded.) When the object of one's entitlements are damaged or destroyed, the entitlement persists, and so the rights violation is still ongoing. When the tortfeasor cannot restore the material object of the plaintiff's entitlement, they must return to the plaintiff the closest thing that they can return, which will typically be money. Since any resources expended to secure that return are expended only because the tortfeasor failed to just cease their ongoing rights violation, those resources are also stolen by the tortfeasor. To return those time and resources will require payment.
Thus, forcibly collecting restitution holds the same justification as defensive violence, because it is just a roundabout instance of defensive violence.
(A draft of this paper's ancestor, which includes the main points here as a section, is available upon request.)
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I argue that well-being for agents is in the success or failure of their actions.
The primary advantage of this view over alternatives such as hedonism, preference/desire-satisfaction and objective list theories is that it requires no table-pounding. With alternatives, we must take on the additional evaluative assumption that pleasure, satisfied preferences, or the objects of an objective list are good for the agent, regardless of whether they recognize it as such. Yet understanding something as an action already presupposes a way that the agent can succeed or fail, and so we require no additional evaluative assumptions beyond those necessary for calling them an agent.
Well-being is not additive, because the success or failure of each action is only success or failure with respect to that action, not with respect to some broader tally of satisfied or frustrated aims. Global assessments of an agent's well-being instead come from the fact that actions are nested in other actions, including longer-running, complex actions that we call projects, ultimately terminating the project of living well. Because these larger projects have explanatory priority over our smaller actions, they also hold normative priority.
Because well-being is strictly grounded in the success conditions of particular actions by particular agents, it also cannot be added up as an average or total across agents. Impersonal axiological calculations of the kind required by consequentialism, then, are incoherent.
(Conference draft available upon request.)
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The strongest intuition in favor of utilitarianism is often thought to be a kind of generalized benevolence: one should want others to be doing well, and it seems that rigorously systematizing this leads us towards utilitarianism. Yet, I argue, a full endorsement of generalized benevolence is ultimately logically incompatible with a full endorsement of utilitarianism.
This is because conditions can be constructed in which impersonal welfare maximization requires adopting an attitude of generalized malevolence towards all but one entity (which is a more developed version of the classic utility monster). I give two such examples. In the first, we suppose an omniscient, indestructible creature who cannot affect the world, but which holds inflexible ultra-sadist preferences such that it receives two units of utility for every one unit of disutility felt by some other creature, and two units of disutility for each unit of utility felt by some other creature. Given this creature's preferences, the total and average utility in the world will always be whatever it would be without that creature, reversed. The second case recreates the same effect in a much more roundabout way and without appeal to sadistic preferences.
If generalized benevolence is to be an argument for utilitarianism, it cannot reduce to impersonal welfare maximization, as this would make the argument question-begging. If we do not assume generalized benevolence is impersonal welfare maximization, then generalized benevolence will speak against actively seeking the ill of all but one creature. Thus, these are logically possible scenarios in which generalized benevolence and utilitarianism conflict, and the utilitarian must ultimately reject generalized benevolence.
The paper considers several objections, including general problems with ludicrous thought experiments. I argue that the best reasons for objecting to ludicrous thought experiments do not apply here, because all that is necessary to understand about the situation imagined is the conflict between impersonal welfare maximization and generalized benevolence (and not any broader intuitive repugnance).
(Draft available upon request.)
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Natural rights theories of property are sometimes called "historical," with the thought being that the justice or injustice of any given title depends on how it was acquired. The sheer pervasiveness of unrectified historic injustice poses a problem for such theories' applicability to the real world. This is especially so when we notice that much of this injustice is unknown, and much of it could not be rectified even in principle. Attempts to solve this issue with lenience towards historic injustice threaten to render natural rights theories Ideological in the pejorative sense, sanctifying the spoils of theft with a mask of justice. Allowing the pervasiveness of historic injustice to throw all existing title into question risks the opposite worry, licensing future injustice with a mask of rectification. In previous work, I called this basic issue "the Poisoning Problem." (See "Recitification & Historic Injustice" in Invited Publications.)
I offer a solution to the Poisoning Problem by focusing on the relational nature of property rights. Historical problems with a given title are relevant only when they affect the relation of a current possessor's claims to those of a given challenger, and the principles of rectification given to us by this framing can apply to the real world without excess lenience or disregard to existing titles.
(Conference version available upon request.)
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Some abolitionist alternatives to the criminal law involve responses not from the state, but actors within civil society. Some retributivists charge that responses from outside the state are necessarily defective, at least with respect to said responses' ability to satisfy justice.
Here I consider and reject two reasons for thinking that considerations of justice morally require satisfaction by the state. (Note: this is a separate question from whether they practically require satisfaction by the state, or whether the state must still serve some coordinating function.) Properly construed, the considerations that seem to require the state in particular require only sufficiently stable norms. No particular agent outside of the state can satisfy this role all on its own, and thus no agent outside of the state can provide justice all on its own. Yet the set of agents involved in justice, taken together, may serve the same function in a distributed manner.
The first reason I consider for thinking that the state alone can provide justice is that it offers a kind of finality or guarantee. The second is that the state uniquely provides a kind of unified voice from the community, which will particularly relevant for expressive retributivism of the kind this dissertation considers. In both cases, the version of that consideration that could not be satisfied in a polycentric way is implausibly strong to the point that it also cannot be satisfied by the state, and the form that the state can actually satisfy can also be satisfied by a polycentric set of agents.
(Happy to discuss the ideas here further via email. Or just come see my talk at Eastern or PPE.)