7. AI Rule and a Fundamental Objection to Epistocracy. AI and Society, conditionally accepted. 

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Epistocracy is rule by whoever is more likely to make correct decisions. AI epistocracy is rule by an artificial intelligence that is more likely to make correct decisions than any humans, individually or collectively. I argue that although various objections have been raised against epistocracy, the most popular do not apply to epistocracy organized around AI rule. I use this result to show that epistocracy is fundamentally flawed because none of its forms provide adequate opportunity for peoples (as opposed to individuals) to develop a record of meaningful moral achievement. This Collective Moral Achievement Objection provides a novel reason to value democracy. It also provides guidance on how we ought to incorporate digital technologies into politics, regardless of how proficient these technologies may become at identifying correct decisions.

 

6. Collective Procedural Memory. Philosophical Studies, 2024. 

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Collective procedural memory is a group’s memory of how to do things, as opposed to a group’s memory of facts. It enables groups to mount effective responses to periodic events (e.g., natural hazards) and to sustain collective projects (e.g., combatting climate change). This article presents an account of collective procedural memory called the Ability Conception. The Ability Conception has various advantages over other accounts of collective procedural memory, such as those appealing to collective know-how and collective identity. It also demonstrates new applications for collective procedural memory. I develop three in this article: to social epistemology, to the ethics of memorialization, and to a pattern of group vulnerability to recurring hazardous events that I call the saeculum effect. (LINK)

 

5. The Dark Knowledge Problem: Why Public Justifications are Not Arguments. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2023. 

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According to the Public Justification Principle, legitimate laws must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Proponents of this principle assume that its satisfaction requires speakers to offer justifications that are representable as arguments that feature premises which reasonable listeners would accept. I develop the concept of dark knowledge to show that this assumption is false. Laws are often justified on the basis of premises that many reasonable listeners know, even though they would reject these premises on the basis of the further considerations that speakers implicitly rely on for their support. Accommodating the fact of dark knowledge requires us to consider the civic virtue of speakers to be more important for public justification than the acceptability of their arguments to reasonable citizens. I sketch an alternative conception of public justification that incorporates these results and argue that it provides a rationale for ignoring the otherwise sound contributions of some participants in political deliberation. (LINK)

 

4. Powerful Deceivers and Public Reason Liberalism: An Argument for Externalization. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2021. 

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Public reason liberals claim that legitimate rules must be justifiable to diverse perspectives. This Public Justification Principle threatens that failing to justify rules to reprehensible agents makes those rules illegitimate. Although public reason liberals have replies to this objection, they cannot avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers. Powerful deceivers trick people who are purportedly owed public justification into considering otherwise good rules to be unjustified. Avoiding this challenge requires discounting some failures of justification, according to what caused people’s beliefs. I offer a conception of public justification that accommodates these externalist considerations while positioning Public Reason Liberalism to provide insight into real cases of deception. (LINK) (PREPRINT)

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3. ‘What’s the Point of Political Philosophy?’ Review of Jonathan Floyd, What’s the Point of Political Philosophy? Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2022. 

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2. Public Justification and the Veil of Testimony. Journal of Political Philosophy, 2020. 

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Public reason liberalism's Public Justification Principle requires that coercive institutions be justifiable to all who live under them. I argue that this principle often cannot be satisfied without many persons depending on the testimony of others, even under realistically idealized situations. Two main results follow. First, the sense of justification relevant to this principle has a strongly externalist component. Second, normative expectations of trust are essential to public justification. On the view I propose, whether the Public Justification Principle is satisfied depends on the features of the network of testifiers in which persons are embedded. I consider several such networks to show which features are plausibly relevant to public justification. The importance of dependence on testimony for public justification ultimately suggests that we should moderate our expectations about the kind of conciliation we can achieve with the social order in which we live.  (LINK)   (PREPRINT)

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1. Knowledge Exclusion and the Rationality of Belief. Analysis, 2019. 

 

Two epistemic principles are Knowledge Exclusion and Belief Exclusion. Knowledge Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent knows that p, then she does not believe that ∼p, and Belief Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent believes that q, then she does not believe that ∼q. Many epistemologists find it reasonable to reject the latter principle and accept the former. I argue that this is in fact not reasonable by proposing a case in which an agent can use that she has contradictory beliefs towards a proposition as decisive evidence for that proposition. A natural response is that this case conflicts with common assumptions about the relation between knowledge, contradictory beliefs and rationality. I reply by drawing ideas from Lasonen-Aarnio’s (2010) remarks on unreasonable knowledge to explain why these common assumptions do not threaten my argument.  (LINK)  (PREPRINT)