Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (forthcoming) [link]

Abstract: This paper defends the existence of a distinctively political domain of normativity—that is, distinct from morality and other normative domains—organized around the central value of a political order making sense (MS) to its subjects as authoritative. The argument is based on an inference to the best explanation: in the same way that the other normative domains help explain familiar normative conflicts, the political domain best explains a familiar kind of normative conflict in politics, namely, the conflict between what morality demands and what makes sense to people as an authoritative order of power. This is the conflict involved when democracies pass unjust laws, or when we consider what would be wrong with instantiating the best theory of justice in a society where people did not want it. I defend this view against two objections. The first is the claim that MS is a notion that can be fully handled from within the moral domain. The second is that even if it is distinctly political, it has no normative authority. I argue that the first objection must give up the plausible thought that MS is pro tanto good, and that the second objection rests on a narrow and untenable notion of normative authority that stacks the deck in favor of the objector. In sum, the paper contributes both (1) a methodological framework for individuating normative domains by their role in explaining conflict, and (2) a substantive case for recognizing a political domain structured around MS.

Social Theory and Practice (forthcoming) [link] [summary in New Work in Philosophy]

Abstract: Many philosophers argue that the right of self-determination confers to states a right to exclude would-be migrants. Drawing on the case of anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century, I argue that self-determination should be thought of as fundamentally a claim against intergroup hierarchy. This means that self-determination only grants a right to exclude in cases where immigration poses a genuine oppressive threat. Cases involving immigration into wealthy and powerful states rarely meet this criterion, and so talk of self-determination as grounding a right to exclude in such cases is misguided.

Res Publica (2025) [link]

Abstract: Despite their theoretical attractiveness, global egalitarian arguments for open borders face the worry that open borders would in fact exacerbate inequality. In this paper, I offer a response to such egalitarian consequentialist concerns. I argue that they fail to attend to the larger political and economic forces that create and maintain inequality. Even in cases where immigration conflicts with egalitarian goals, the conflicts tend to be due to contingent circumstances that egalitarians have reason to change. As such, they do not pose a deep challenge for egalitarian defenses of open borders. However, they do illuminate an important and overlooked point: egalitarians should construe open borders as part of a broad and coherent global egalitarian program, both politically and philosophically. This is in contrast to an approach that sees the border question as an isolated and abstract philosophical question. Furthermore, egalitarians would do well to engage the political economic factors that drive migration in our world, and to buttress their concerns of distributive justice with arguments emphasizing the negative effects of the global border regime on social and relational equality.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2021) [link] [interview]

Abstract: Are countries especially entitled, if not obliged, to prioritize the interests or well-being of their own citizens during a global crisis, such as a global pandemic? We call this partiality for compatriots in times of crisis “crisis nationalism”. Vaccine nationalism is one vivid example of crisis nationalism during the COVID-19 pandemic; so is the case of the US government’s purchasing a 3-month supply of the global stock of the antiviral Remdesivir for domestic use. Is crisis nationalism justifiable at all, and, if it is, what are its limits? We examine some plausible arguments for national partiality, and conclude that these arguments support crisis nationalism only within strict limits. The different arguments for partiality, as we will note, arrive at these limits for different reasons. But more generally, so we argue, any defensible crisis nationalism must not entail the violation of human rights or the worsening of people’s deprivation. Moreover, we propose that good faith crisis nationalism ought to be sensitive to the potential moral costs of national partiality during a global crisis and must take extra care to control or offset these costs. Thus, crisis nationalism in the form of vaccine nationalism or the hoarding of global supplies of therapeutics during a global pandemic exceeds the bounds of acceptable partiality.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A (2013) [link]

Abstract: In this paper, we develop and refine the idea that understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Specifically, we defend the idea that S understands why p if and only if S knows that p, and, for some q, S’s true belief that q correctly explains p is produced/maintained by reliable explanatory evaluation. We then show how this model explains the reception of James Bjorken’s explanation of scaling by the broader physics community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The historical episode is interesting because Bjorken’s explanation initially did not provide understanding to other physicists, but was subsequently deemed intelligible when Feynman provided a physical interpretation that led to experimental tests that vindicated Bjorken’s model. Finally, we argue that other philosophical models of scientific understanding are best construed as limiting cases of our more general model.