My Big Ideas
Academic websites—mine included—tend to list some broad areas of interest and then list papers. It's hard to tell from such generic info just what the papers contribute, or how interesting the work actually is. This page attempts to do better: a big-picture summary of some of my main ideas and contributions — themes that are developed at greater length in my book in progress, Beyond Right and Wrong.
Idea 1 of 7
Beneficentrism
Helping others effectively matters—whatever else does, too.
People commonly dismiss reasons of beneficence as “utilitarian”, when they're really much broader than that. Whatever else you believe about ethics, promoting the general good remains an important moral goal—one that's widely neglected, and that non-consequentialists too can (and should) embrace. This idea channels what I take to be the implicit normative content behind Effective Altruism, and it shapes how I do applied ethics: think about whose interests, and what possible improvements, tend to be overlooked by conventional morality.
Best objection: The long-run ripple effects of our actions are unforeseeable, and likely to swamp the effects we can predict—so we're clueless about which acts actually do the most good. (James Lenman, ‘Consequentialism and Cluelessness’, 2000)
My reply: Hard Questions Aren't Hopeless · The Cluelessness Objection (utilitarianism.net)
Go deeper: Beneficentrism · ‘Why Not Effective Altruism?’ · Charitable giving
Idea 2 of 7
Telic Ethics and Priority-setting
Permissibility is overrated.
Most ethicists focus on deontic questions, seeking to identify what is permissible and impermissible. I think such questions are overrated, and we do better to focus moral inquiry on the telic question of what to prioritize (or take as our moral ends). The telic question accommodates a wider range of ethical theories, carries greater and more transparent normative authority, and encourages appropriate moral ambition—in contrast to the passive negative goal of just “not acting wrongly”. This might be the most important idea that I'm currently working on.
Best objection: Morality is fundamentally about accountability—what we can legitimately demand of one another—and that requires deontic concepts like obligation and wrongness. (Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 2006)
My reply: We can retain deontic concepts without focusing on them so centrally.
Go deeper: Axiology, Deontics, and the Telic Question · Beyond Right and Wrong (book in progress)
Idea 3 of 7
The Need for Positivity in Ethics
An empty universe maximally satisfies every purely negative goal.
Much of ethics is framed negatively, identifying things to avoid: wrongdoing, injustice, suffering, harm, risk. But if we're to appropriately appreciate the good in the world, we should instead identify the positive goal that each negative rule implicitly serves: secure sufficiency rather than avoiding harm; prefer QALYs gained over DALYs averted; replace aversion to wrongdoing with concern to act well. In general, we're biased towards overweighting risks of commission and underweighting risks of omission—and a lot of progress in applied ethics could be made by simply correcting for this bias.
An opposing view: Benatar's anti-natalism. The absence of pain is good even if no one exists to enjoy it, while the absence of pleasure is not bad unless someone is deprived of it—so coming into existence is always a harm. (David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 2006)
My reply: ‘Rethinking the Asymmetry’ · The Profoundest Error in Population Ethics
Go deeper: Don't Valorize the Void · ‘Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk’
Idea 4 of 7
Valuing Concrete Individuals
People are not mere “value receptacles”.
Many philosophers think that utilitarianism violates the separateness of persons, regarding people as fungible mere means to aggregate value. They're wrong: there's no barrier to assigning separate, non-fungible value to each particular welfare subject—which undermines the principled basis for non-aggregative approaches to ethics. Generalizing the point: the abstract criteria found in our theories (like “maximizing value”) are mere summary criteria; the actual normative work is done by the concrete ways of meeting them. This yields a novel response to the alienation objection, and to the charge that modern ethical theories leave our motives and our reasons in disharmony.
Best objection: Scanlon's Transmitter Room. Jones is suffering agonizing electric shocks, and rescuing him would interrupt a World Cup broadcast for a great many viewers. Surely we should rescue Jones, however many viewers would miss out—yet aggregative views seem to deny this. (T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 1998)
My reply: Evaluating Acts and Outcomes (§ Reflecting on Anti-Aggregative Intuitions)
Go deeper: ‘Value Receptacles’ · ‘The Right Wrong-Makers’ · Theses on Mattering
Idea 5 of 7
Non-Ideal Decision Theory: Taking Fallibilism Seriously
Moral theories aren't meant to guide us directly.
Ethical theories tell us what fundamentally matters; they don't tell fallible, biased agents how to pursue it. That further question—instrumental rationality for human-sized minds—is badly under-theorized. Philosophers tend to tacitly assume naïve instrumentalism (act on your first-pass calculations), but this is a false theory of instrumental rationality, and the flaws people attribute to consequentialism mostly belong to it. Prudent agents instead treat reliable norms as corrections for known biases, like an archer adjusting for the wind—and the point generalizes: deontologists benefit from a two-level view too.
An opposing view: If utilitarianism advises against thinking in utilitarian terms, it becomes self-effacing. As Bernard Williams put it, “utilitarianism's fate is to usher itself from the scene.” (Utilitarianism: For and Against, 1973)
My reply: The objection assumes naïve instrumentalism, but provides no reason to prefer it over an endorsable non-ideal decision theory.
Go deeper: Naïve Instrumentalism · The Train to Crazy Town · Two-Level Deontology · ‘Fittingness Objections to Consequentialism’ §5
Idea 6 of 7
Normative Disambiguation: Fittingness and Deontic Pluralism
‘Ought’ is ambiguous—so disambiguate it.
Too many ethicists rely on treating ‘ought’ as a primitive, when it often needs disambiguation. Progress comes from thinking through what our normative claims actually demand of our agency—what attitudes or responses turn out to be warranted or “fitting”. One surprising upshot: Global Consequentialism, Scalar Consequentialism, and Act Consequentialism turn out to be mere terminological variants of the same core view.
Best objection: There is a single notion of moral wrongness that is of ultimate concern to the morally conscientious person. (Peter A. Graham, Subjective versus Objective Moral Wrongness, 2021)
My reply: What's at Stake in the Objective/Subjective Wrongness Debate?
Go deeper: ‘Consequentialism: Core and Expansion’ · ‘Fittingness’ · Deontic Ambiguity
Idea 7 of 7
…and More
The grab bag.
Some further ideas that resist tidy categorization: a new paradox of deontology (perhaps the strongest general objection to deontology on offer; try it as a game); five fallacies of collective harm; a principled account of satisficing; how salience shapes our moral judgments; and the parallels between metaethics and the philosophy of mind.
Go deeper: read the full post · browse my research
P.S. I'd love to see more academics write summaries like this. If you share your own, feel free to blame me for asking!