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Papers Under Review

The following are some of my manuscripts that are currently under review, all of which can be available by request! Feel free to contact me for discussion as well 🙂

Developing the Bounded View of Aggregation

  • Summary: Many of us have robust anti-additive intuitions. For instance, it seems as though no number n of mild headaches could ever be of more disvalue than a single death, albeit that, plausibly, both a mild headache and a death have a finite disvalue. One initially appealing way to accommodate these intuitions is to adopt what I call a bounded view of aggregation, where the (dis)values of the component parts of an outcome asymptotically approach a limit. Despite its intuitive core, the bounded view faces several objections, often leaving proponents of anti-additive-aggregation looking elsewhere. Here, I move things forward in two ways. First, I develop a family of refined bounded views, which I argue avoid all of the standard objections to bounded aggregation. Second, I draw out the fruits of this refined family of views. In particular, it is usually thought that anti-additivity must commit one to intransitivity, because of famous paradoxes in population ethics. Here, I show that refined bounded views resolve these paradoxes in an incredibly satisfying way. I also argue that refined bounded views reveal a more general blueprint for resolving other puzzles concerning anti-additivity and transitivity.

Defeasible Warrant in Intuitionistic Logic

  • Summary: One of the key projects for logic generally, and intuitionistic logic in particular, is extending our logical systems to incorporate defeasible warrant, which is a vital part of our empirical discourse. This project, however, has run into several well-known difficulties. In this paper, I develop a new logic, which is a conservative extension of intuitionistic logic, that introduces a relation of epistemic proximity and moves this project forward. I show that the semantics for this logic not only captures defeasibility but is able to model grades or degrees of defeasible warrant. The semantics is also accompanied by a proof system, which I prove to be sound and complete.

Furthering the Wide Objection to New Actualism

  • Summary: New actualism has become an increasingly popular approach to modal metaphysics, claiming that p is possible iff there is some actual potentiality (disposition, ability, power) for p. The main objection to new actualism has been the too-narrow objection: actual potentialities are too narrow to ground modality, since there are possibilities, like the nomic laws being different, which no substance has the potentiality for. In this paper, I argue there is a powerful converse objection that has been largely underdeveloped: the too-wide objection. Indeed, there is a growing body of work in multiple philosophical circles indicating that agents have potentialities to do the impossible. The objective of this paper is to showcase how extant this threat is: from debates about compatibilism, to plentitude, to theism, to Fitch’s paradox, to principles of objective chance, and to time travel, impossible potentialities have become vital to philosophical theorizing. After developing the wide objection, I assess options for the new actualist.

Causal Finitism and the Poss-Ability Principle

  • Summary: In this paper, I develop a new problem for the Grim Reaper Argument for causal finitism. I show that the argument, as developed by Alexander Pruss (2018), is structurally identical to the Grandfather Argument for the impossibility of time travel. Using this surprising fact, I show that the argument has, all along, implicitly relied on the Poss-Ability principle: if an agent is able to p, there’s a metaphysically possible world where they in fact p. While prima facie plausible, arguments for the denial of this principle have gained currency in a variety of different philosophical circles––especially the time travel literature. The results are twofold. First, substantively, a novel objection to the Grim Reaper Argument is developed. Second, more methodologically, a deep, mostly unexplored similarity between the causal finitism and time travel dialectics is diagnosed, opening up many new future insights for both literatures.
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