Research

Journal Articles

1. 2026
   “On the Importance of Slack.” Ethics, forthcoming (with Zvi Mowshowitz and Scott Siskind).

   This paper is on the concept of ‘slack’. Slack is a buffer against binding constraints on behaviour. It comes in many forms, including as time, money, space, emotional capacity, and one’s social network. It enables you to weather sudden shocks and avoid crises. It gives you room to fail, and to fail more frequently. It enables you to pursue opportunities: you can take on more risk. It enables you to live up to your principles, to explore and attend to new things, and to break out of bad local optima. Slack is often good for individuals, and can create positive externalities for groups. The paper distinguishes the concept from nearby notions, showing that it is not already accounted for in existing treatments of freedom. The paper finally describes how slack is under several kinds of threats. Slack has a tendency to be spent, because the costs of spending it are hard to notice. Pressures to optimize eat up slack, as does competition.

2. “Signalling, Sanctioning and Sensitising: How to Uphold Norms with Blame.” Synthese, 207, 135.

   This paper provides a unified account of the nature of blame by taking a broader look at the connection between individual blaming reactions and the moral practices of communities. The methodological proposal is that to understand what blame is, we need to understand what it does, but to understand what it does, we need to understand what problems it helps solve. This, in turn, requires looking at the kinds of problems that communities have qua communities, namely, developing agents who are competent norm-followers and who are motivated to exercise this competence. The reason blame seems so heterogeneous is that it has not one, but several, connected effects: it signals, sanctions and sensitises. Signalling provides assurance that norms will be upheld and enforced. Sanctioning deters norm violations. Sensitising produces agents who have internalised the norms and who are skilled at complying with them. These effects combine to produce agents who are robustly disposed to uphold norms, which is a very valuable thing to create.

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3. “Epistemic Blame isn’t Relationship Modification.” The Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming.

   Epistemologists have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at purely epistemic norm violations. Leading the charge has been Cameron Boult, who has argued across a series of papers that we can make sense of this phenomenon by building an account of epistemic blame off of Scanlon’s account of moral blame. This paper argues a relationship-based account of epistemic blame is untenable, because it eliminates any distinction between blameworthy and excused agents. Attempts to overcome this problem cannot succeed because of the important but unrecognised ways his account deviates from Scanlon’s, and because of differences in how our moral and epistemic conduct are affected by our attitudes and expectations.

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4. “Scepticism About Epistemic Blame Scepticism.” Episteme, forthcoming.

   A number of philosophers have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at epistemic norm violations qua epistemic norm violations. However, Smartt (2024) and Matheson and Milam (2022) have recently provided several arguments in favour of thinking epistemic blame either doesn’t exist, or is never justified. This paper argues these challenges are unsuccessful, and along the way evaluates the prospects for various accounts of epistemic blame. It also reflects on the dialectic between sceptics and realists about epistemic blame, and what choice-points are available for moving the debate forward.

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5. 2025
   “Epistemic Hypocrisy and Standing to Blame.” Erkenntnis, 90: 2549–2569.

   This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand our objections to epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing.

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6. “Hypocritical Blame as Dishonest Signalling.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.

   This paper proposes a new theory of the nature of hypocritical blame and why it is objectionable, arguing that hypocritical blame is a form of dishonest signaling. Blaming provides very important benefits: through its ability to signal our commitments to norms and unwillingness to tolerate norm violations, it greatly contributes to valuable norm-following. Hypocritical blamers, however, are insufficiently committed to the norms or values they blame others for violating. As allowing their blame to pass unchecked threatens the signaling system, our strong interest in maintaining valuable norm-following by tracking who has what commitments justifies objecting to hypocritical blame.

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7. “A Modest Defense of Somewhat Selective Outrage” (with Scott Siskind). Ergo, 12: 21.

   Many people think there is something objectionable about “selective outrage.” After investigating how to best characterise what selective outrage is and what these objections target, this paper argues that selective outrage can actually have important positive effects. Because we often have limited resources with which to enforce norms, it can be collectively prudent to prioritise enforcing norms that are well-established or collectively recognisable over those that are not. This will sometimes require responding to individual wrongs that seem less immoral, outrageous or in need of attention than others. We argue that when we encounter agents who are outraged about a violation of a genuinely valuable norm but not another relevantly similar violation, we should generally refrain from objecting unless we have good independent evidence the agent’s outrage stems from objectionable motives.

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8. 2024
   “The Utilitarian’s Guide to Dreams.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 105(1): 75–97.

   Unpleasant dreams occur much more frequently than many people realise. If one is a hedonistic utilitarian – or, at least, one thinks that dreams have positive or negative moral value in virtue of their experiential quality – then one has considerable reason to try to make such dreams more positive. Given it is possible to improve the quality of our dreams, we ought to be promoting and implementing currently available interventions that improve our dream experiences, and conducting research to find new, more effective interventions.

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9. 2023
   “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Unwelcome Epistemic Company.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 53(2): 121–137.

   The problem of unwelcome epistemic company refers to the problem of encountering agreement with your beliefs from an unwelcome source, such as someone who is known to form unreliable beliefs or have values you reject. Blanchard (2023) and Levy (2023) argue that when we encounter unwelcome agreement, we may have reason to reduce our confidence in our matching beliefs. I argue that unwelcome epistemic company rarely provides reasons to reduce our confidence, and apparent successes at improving our beliefs using unwelcome company are explained by extraneous factors. Seeing why unwelcome agents are rarely evidence our belief is false requires making a distinction between two kinds of agents who regularly form false beliefs: unreliable agents and anti-reliable agents. While unreliable agents are common, they are uninformative. While anti-reliable agents would be informative, they are incredibly rare.

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10. “Does Being a ‘Bad Feminist’ Make Me a Hypocrite? Politics, Commitments and Moral Consistency.” Philosophical Studies, 180(12): 3467–3488.

    A ‘bad feminist’ is someone who endorses feminist ideals and values but finds themselves falling short of them. Since bad feminists exhibit an inconsistency between what they say and what they do, this can generate worries about hypocrisy. This article investigates whether and when members of political movements with certain ideals ought to worry they are being hypocritical. It first provides a diagnosis of why worries about hypocrisy seem common in the political arena. I argue that accusations of hypocrisy are apt when one is insufficiently committed to the values entailed by one’s pronouncements. It is particularly hard to assess what constitutes sufficient commitment in politics because many issues are multi-factorial, overdetermined, and involve numerous competing considerations, making it difficult to assess how genuine commitments to values should manifest in behaviour.

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11. “Epistemic Health, Epistemic Immunity, and Epistemic Inoculation” (with Scott Siskind). Philosophical Studies, 180(8): 2329–2354.

    This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded by many different things (e.g. research funding, social trust), and many different kinds of inquiry are relevant to its study. Epistemic immunity is the robustness with which an entity is resistant to performing certain kinds of epistemic activity, such as questioning certain ideas, believing certain sources, or making certain inferences. Epistemic inoculation occurs when social, political or cultural processes cause an entity to become immune to engaging in certain epistemic activities. After outlining each of these concepts, we close by considering some of the risks associated with attempts to improve others’ epistemic health.

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12. “Attributionist Group Agent Responsibility.” The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 25(3): 495–515.

    A number of philosophers have recently argued that group agents can be morally responsible for their actions in virtue of having a certain kind of structured decision-making procedure which is responsive to reasons. However, accounts of group agent blameworthiness face some objections. One is that group agents cannot be responsible for wrongdoing because they are unable to experience certain kinds of emotional responses (Thompson, 2018). Another is that group agents who regularly commit wrongdoing due to certain structural impediments will always be excused for their wrongdoing. This paper demonstrates such problems can be avoided by adopting an Attributionist theory of group moral responsibility. On this approach, though group agents lack certain capacities, their ability to deny that certain facts provide moral reasons to act in certain ways is sufficient to mean they hold objectionable attitudes towards us, and those attitudes are sufficient to make group agents blameworthy.

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13. “Vice Epistemology, Norm-Maintenance and Epistemic Evasiveness.” Synthese, 203(105): 1–20.

    Vice epistemology studies how character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles systematically get in the way of knowledge, while doxastic responsibility is concerned with what kinds of responses are appropriate towards agents who believe badly. This paper identifies a new connection between these two fields, arguing that our propensity to take responsibility for our doxastic failures is directly relevant for vice epistemology, and in particular, understanding the social obstacles to knowledge that epistemic vices can create. This is because responses to norm violations are an important mechanism by which norms are upheld, and maintaining epistemic norms is crucial for our collective epistemic successes. This paper then identifies a new kind of vice, one which is bad precisely because of the way it undermines the epistemic norms that our blaming practices help maintain, and thus the benefits that said norms create. Evasiveness is bad because it creates uncertainty about which agents are reliable, it prevents holders of this attitude from learning from their mistakes, and it signals to third parties that the norm is not being upheld, making them less likely to follow the norm.

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14. “Situationism, Subjunctive Hypocrisy and Standing to Blame.” Inquiry, 66(4): 514–538.

    Philosophers have argued that subjects who act wrongly in the situationist psychology experiments are morally responsible for their actions. This paper argues that though the obedient subjects in Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments are blameworthy, since most of us would have acted in the same manner they did, it is inappropriate for most of us to blame them. On Todd’s (2019) recent account of standing to blame, agents lack the standing to blame others for a wrong when they are not sufficiently committed to the moral values which would condemn that wrong. I argue that the obedient subjects lack sufficient commitment to the kinds of values which would condemn their wrongdoing. This is evidenced by the fact that the wrongdoing was severe, that the subjects had the capacity to avoid wrongdoing, and that there was very little cost to avoiding wrongdoing. Since these studies are very well-replicated, most of us in the moral community would have acted as they did for similar reasons. At least 80% of us therefore lack the standing to blame the obedient subjects.

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15. 2022
    “Situationism and Trait-Eliciting Situations.” Analysis, 83(1): 80–88.

    Doris, in his 2002 book Lack of Character and 2005 paper ‘Replies: evidence and sensibility’, famously argues that we lack the kinds of global character traits posited by theories of virtue, because the situationist experiments demonstrate that people do not display trait-relevant behaviour in trait-relevant situations above chance. This paper argues that some notable situationist experiments are not trait-relevant situations. By analysing which factors improve or reduce participants’ chances of success (e.g. stress, lack of familiarity, ambiguity), and observing that these factors decrease agents’ capacity to recognize and respond to a variety of reasons in a variety of settings, the best explanation of many subjects’ failure to do the right thing is that they are affected by factors that are capacity-compromising. This matters, because settings in which agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing are typically not apt tests of an agent’s character traits.

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16. “Situationism, Capacities and Culpability.” Philosophical Studies, 179(6): 1997–2027.

    The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people’s behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects’ responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded capacities when this is the best explanation of a change in patterns of responses. With this approach in hand, I then argue that subjects in many of the situationist experiments are (mostly) excused for their actions.

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17. 2021
    “A Second-Personal Solution to the Paradox of Moral Complaint.” Utilitas, 33(1): 111–117.

    Smilansky (2006) notes that wrongdoers seem to lack any entitlement to complain about being treated in the ways that they have treated others. However, it also seems impermissible to treat agents in certain ways, and that this impermissibility would give wrongdoers who are themselves wronged grounds for complaint. This paper solves this apparent paradox by arguing that what is at issue is not the right to simply make complaints, but the right to have one’s demands respected. Agents must accept the authority of others to make second-personal demands on them before they can expect others to treat their own demands (or complaints) as legitimate. Wrongdoers’ previous wrongdoing shows they do not treat others’ demands as authoritative, and this undermines their entitlement to have their own demands respected.

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18. “What Do We Want From a Theory of Epistemic Blame?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 99(4): 791–805.

    This paper identifies a number of questions that any plausible theory of epistemic blame ought to answer. What is epistemic blame? When is someone an appropriate target of epistemic blame? And what justifies engaging in epistemic blame? I argue that a number of problems arise when we try to answer these questions by using existing conceptions of moral blame. I then consider and reject Brown’s (2020) belief-desire model of epistemic blame. Finally, I argue that an agency-cultivation model of moral responsibility is not only able to help us to develop a plausible theory of epistemic blame; it is particularly well-placed to do so.

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19. “Responsibility for Testimonial Injustice.” Philosophical Studies, 178: 597–615.

    In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack of capacity back to an earlier culpable wrongdoing will often fail, due to there being no point at which these agents culpably failed to develop this capacity. This is because perpetrators’ lack of awareness of what they are doing makes it the case that they are not expressing objectionable evaluative judgments in the way required for blameworthiness. Finally, I argue that our temptation to blame agents who commit testimonial injustice is not completely unfounded. Appealing to Watson’s (1996) attributability/accountability distinction allows us to make sense of how some responses to the jurors are appropriate, despite their being excused.

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20. 2020
    “Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 101(4): 603–627.

    This paper identifies why hypocrites lack the standing to blame others for certain wrongs. By identifying problems with thinking of hypocritical blame as inappropriate and examining how the concept of standing is used in other contexts, I argue that we should think of standing to blame as a status that grants agents a normative power. Using Darwall’s account of second-personal obligations, I argue that hypocrites lack the standing to blame because they lack the authority to blame. Hypocrites lack this authority because they fail to accept other people’s second-personal authority to make similar demands on them. For these demands to impose obligations on others, however, we must first have the authority to make these demands. I argue that agents who lack standing to blame lack the authority to blame, and thus lack the ability to impose second-personal obligations on others by making these demands.

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21. “Blame in the Aftermath of Excused Wrongdoing.” Public Affairs Quarterly, 34(2): 142–168.

    Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame.

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22. “Philosophy’s Undergraduate Gender Gaps and Early Interventions.” Ergo, 6: 707–741.

    Researchers have found that philosophy’s gender gap gradually increases as students progress from first year to majoring and into graduate school. By analysing enrolments in philosophy units at Australian universities from 2005 to 2017, I argue that early interventions are likely to be more effective than typically assumed. My findings are consistent with previous data but improve on previous analyses in a few ways. First, this paper quantifies women’s risk of leaving philosophy relative to men at each point throughout their studies and confirms women’s relative risk of leaving philosophy is much higher than men’s throughout all of their undergraduate studies.

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Edited Collection Chapters

1. “Situationism” (with John Doris). In The Encyclopedia of Moral Psychology. Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming.

   Details coming soon.

2. 2024
   “Standing to Blame.” In International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette. John Wiley & Sons.

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3. “Pleasure, Happiness, and the Moral Life: John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, Chapter 2.” In The Philosophy Teaching Library, edited by Robert Weston Siscoe.

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4. 2023
   “Introduction to Philosophy of Religion.” In Short Cuts: Philosophy, edited by Laura D’Olympio. UniPress Books.

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