Published

Superiority Discounting Implies the Preposterous Conclusion

Utilitas, 2022

Many population axiologies avoid the Repugnant Conclusion (RC) by endorsing Superiority: Some number of great lives is better than any number of mediocre lives. But as Nebel shows, RC follows (given plausible auxiliary assumptions) from the Intrapersonal Repugnant Conclusion (IRC): A guaranteed mediocre life is better than a sufficiently small probability of a great life. This result is concerning because IRC is plausible. Recently, Kosonen has argued that IRC can be true while RC is false if small probabilities are discounted to zero. This paper details the unique problems created by combining Superiority with discounting. The resultant view, Superiority Discounting, avoids the Repugnant Conclusion only at the cost of the Preposterous Conclusion: Near-certain hell for arbitrarily many people is better than near-certain heaven for arbitrarily many people.

Where Tracking Loses Traction

Episteme, 2020

Tracking theories see knowledge as a relation between a subject’s belief and the truth, where the former is responsive to the latter. This relationship involves causation in virtue of a sensitivity condition, which is constrained by an adherence condition. The result is what I call a stable causal relationship between a fact and a subject’s belief in that fact. I argue that when we apprehend the precise role of causation in the theory, previously obscured problems pour out.

This paper presents thirteen distinct and original counterexamples to Nozick’s tracking theory—many of which also constitute problems for more recent tracking theories. I begin by discussing how tracking relates to causation: Nozick invokes causation through conditions similar to those of Lewisian causal dependence. As a result, when causal dependence is not necessary for causation, Nozick fails to identify knowledge. I then address the inability of causation to capture epistemically important concepts, such as justification and truth. I conclude by discussing the underlying asymmetries between causation and knowledge that undermine any attempt to reduce knowledge to a purely metaphysical relation.

Epistemic Degrees

Honours Thesis, 2019

(Awarded Julius Kovesi Memorial Prize; Shortlisted for J. A Wood Memorial Prize)

The received view in epistemology is that knowledge is absolute: you either know a fact or fail to know it; knowledge does not admit of degrees. This position is known as epistemic absolutism. I reject this position.

The absolutist picture of knowledge is bizarre, incomplete, and incoherent. These criticisms concern metaphysically unusual behaviour, an inability to ground epistemic normativity, and incompatibility with epistemic closure.

This paper presents an epistemological system centred around epistemic gradualism. The system contains novel theories of knowledge, justification, and foundationalism; it offers unique solutions to the Gettier problem, contextualism, and scepticism, among other epistemological puzzles.

In Progress

Duty and Risk

According to absolutist moral theories, agents may not violate their duties for the sake of arbitrarily valuable consequences. Yet intuitively, it is permissible to take a sufficiently small risk of violation for the sake of the consequences. The Risk Problem is that it is notoriously difficult to give a principled account of how good consequences can justify the small risk, but no larger quantity of good consequences could justify the larger risk. I show that extant solutions to the Risk Problem have fatal flaws, then offer a theory that avoids these issues. The basic idea is that agents maximize rounded expected deontic weight (the degree to which, in some outcome, they uphold their duties) and use expected value to break ties. We find that absolutists have a generous helping of standard decision-theoretic resources at their disposal. Then, we use these resources to start doing absolutist decision theory, discovering surprising results about how absolutists should relate to preference axioms. They must, for instance, give up the Sure Thing Principle and the dominance principles it secures. Fortunately, as we come to see, these principles are unattractive—and arguments for them unconvincing—to the absolutist.

Ignoring the Improbable

(Awarded AAP Postgraduate Presentation Prize)

Many problems in decision theory appear to be solvable if agents simply ignore some possibilities. The utility of this approach has given rise to a substantial number of theories endorsing “discounting”: ignoring states whose probability is below a particular threshold. This paper argues that ignoring possibilities—even extremely remote ones—comes at a hefty cost for one’s ability to make rational decisions. First, the approach is inescapably partition-sensitive: agents will undertake different acts depending on how the world is described. Second, agents become insensitive to differences in the probability of excluded states; they will be indifferent between taking a small risk and a much smaller risk. Third, agents become insensitive to differences in the value of outcomes in excluded states; they will be indifferent between risking a bad outcome and a much worse outcome. And fourth, excluding a state affects the expected value of all acts to which the state is relevant, generating implausible prescriptions for peripheral acts; for instance, agents will not take any bet on the excluded state since they have assigned it a probability of zero.