To Be Updated!

Below are the titles, links, and abstracts for some of my published papers. I’m happy to share pre-prints, too! Just email me here.

• Bare-Difference Methodology and the Scientific Analogy (Ratio)

  The bare-difference methodology is considered to be a powerful tool in ethical reasoning. The underlying idea is that we can identify the intrinsic evaluative significance of some feature by constructing contrast cases or bare-difference cases, i.e., two cases that hold everything constant but for the feature of interest. While this popular methodology has been challenged by prominent philosophers such as Kagan, Thomson, and Kamm, it is intuitively appealing because, as Perrett identifies, the methodology appears to share the same logical structure as a fruitful scientific procedure. In this paper, I argue that examining this ‘scientific analogy’ is crucial to understanding both the limitations and the prospects for ethical bare-difference reasoning. I expand upon Perrett's discussion of the scientific analogy and examine another relevant similarity. I then highlight two relevant dissimilarities between ethical bare-difference reasoning and its scientific analogue. Though these differences threaten to undermine the analogy, I show how the analogy might be mended to better bring the ethical methodology in line with its scientific counterpart and avoid challenges to ethical bare-difference methodology raised by philosophers in the literature.

• Value Invariabilism and Two Distinctions in Value (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)

  Following Moore, value invariabilists deny that the intrinsic value of something can be affected by features extrinsic to it. The primary focuses of this paper are (i) to examine the invariabilistic thesis and expand upon how we ought to understand it, in light of contemporary axiological distinctions, and (ii) to argue that distinguishing between different kinds of invariabilism provides resources to undermine a prominent argument against variabilism. First, I use two contemporary axiological distinctions to clarify what kind of value the invariabilism debate concerns (final value). Then I show how the distinction between personal value and value simpliciter reveals different variabilistic theses, depending on what type of final value one thinks may be affected by extrinsic features. Using this insight, I challenge an argument for final value simpliciter invariabilism. Variabilists offer the example of the vicious being pleased as a counterexample to the claim that pleasure’s final value is invariant to contextual changes. The argument that I examine purports to show that this case actually supports invariabilism about pleasure’s final value simpliciter, because the best explanation for why the vicious being pleased is a fitting object of indignation is that the vicious person’s pleasure is finally valuable simpliciter. I argue that this argument fails because the vicious person’s pleasure being finally personally good for them better explains why an attitude of indignation is fitting. I address two objections and conclude with remarks about how my results might inform future research on value invariabilism.

• Violent Deaths, Vicious Preferences, and Bare-Differences: A Reply to Hill (Australasian Journal of Philosophy)

  Hill [AJP, 2018] argues that Rachels’s famous bare-difference argument for the moral irrelevance between killing and letting die fails. In this paper, I argue that certain features in Hill’s cases might lead our intuitions astray. I propose new cases and suggest that they support the conclusion that, in itself, intentional killing is morally equivalent to intentional letting-die.

• Bare-Difference Methodology and a Problematic Separability Principle (The Journal of Value Inquiry)

  In this paper, I argue that the prominent bare-difference methodology in applied ethics is unsound due to a problematic separability principle. This principle purportedly licenses us to infer relations of intrinsic value between two rival features from the intrinsic value relations between two wholes that are barely-different but for the features. I argue that we should reject this principle by generating a contradiction using two pairs of bare-difference cases and it. I argue that neither of the bare-difference cases should be rejected and, therefore, we must reject the principle to avoid the contradiction. Finally, I conclude with a brief argument that another principle which might be used in bare-difference arguments is acceptable only if the trichotomy thesis of evaluative comparability is false.

• Predictive Brain Implants: Advance Directives with a Mechanical Twist (Open Peer Commentary at American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience)

  The third section of Gilbert’s article features moral questions raised by the prospect of using predictive brain implants to control autonomy by inhibiting undesirable behaviors. In what follows, I argue that if we think that enforcing advance directives is compatible with respecting autonomy under certain circumstances, then allowing people who want to use a brain device as a means to inhibit undesirable behaviors to do so is compatible with respecting autonomy under those circumstances as well.

  First, I discuss ethical considerations about autonomy in the advance directive literature. Next, I argue that the circumstances under which advance directives are consistent with respect for autonomy apply analogously to the use of undesirable-behavior-inhibiting devices. Thus, I conclude that if advance directives are compatible with autonomy in certain circumstances, then the use of brain implants by people who want to control undesirable behaviors is compatible with respecting their autonomy in those circumstances as well.