Upcoming and ongoing
Upcoming and ongoing
Upcoming and ongoing
Research
My research sits at the intersection between bounded rationality, inquiry, and value theory. I want to know how bounded agents should make up their minds about what to do and believe, and how the answers to these questions bear on altruistic decisionmaking and the ethics of emerging technologies.
Most of my research falls into two clusters.
Cluster 1: Bounded rationality and inquiry
[About]
Humans are bounded agents. We have limited cognitive abilities, and in exercising these abilities we incur costs. Theories of bounded rationality ask what rationality requires of bounded agents.
Herbert Simon held that the fundamental turn in the study of bounded rationality is the procedural turn from the of attitudes such as belief and preference towards the study of processes of inquiry which produce them. The cornerstone of a theory of bounded rationality is then a theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents.
My work develops and defends a reason-responsive consequentialist theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. I apply this view to shed light on traditional problems in bounded rationality and the epistemology of inquiry.
Representative work
Oxford University Press, 2024
Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108.2 (2024): 396-413
Philosophical Studies 178 (2021): 2913-28
Cluster 2: Longtermism
[About]
Suppose you are an altruist. You want to do the most good you can with the limited resources available to you. What should you do?
Longtermists suggest that the best thing to do would be to use your resources to improve the very long-term future of humanity on a time-scale of thousands, millions or billions of years. Given the vast number of lives yet to be lived, even a small chance of providing some benefit to future populations may have enormous value.
My work develops an overlapping series of normative and descriptive challenges to longtermism. I suggest instead that philanthropists should return to supporting evidence-backed interventions on a short- and medium-term timescale, such as global health and development work.
Representative work
Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk
Ethics, forthcoming
Against the singularity hypothesis
Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
High risk, low reward: A challenge to the astronomical value of existential risk mitigation
Philosophy and Public Affairs 51.4 (2023): 373-412