“I know that I know nothing…” — But this hasn’t stopped philosophers from writing millions of pages since the seminal days of Socrates. Remaining true to this time-honored tradition, I have worked on several projects outside of my AOS.

“Public Servants” (Journal of Moral Philosophy) — Mario Iván Juárez García and I propose a constitutional change to our democratic system that aims to mitigate principal-agent problems by tying the compensation of public officials to a democratically chosen metric of performance.

“The Lukewarm Religions of Rawls’s Overlapping Consensus” (Aporia) — This paper criticizes Rawls’s idea of the overlapping consensus as a secular ideology that implicitly crowds out authentic religious practice. This is a very old paper, and I have since revised my views on the topic.

“Incoherent but Reasonable: A Defense of Truth-Abstinence in Political Liberalism” (Social Theory and Practice) — Wes Siscoe and I defend Rawls from several critics (from David Estlund, Joshua Cohen, and Joseph Raz) that claim he cannot coherently abstain from using the concept of truth when defending his version of liberalism. These critics err, we argue, by missing one of Rawls’s most crucial moves: replacing the theoretical criterion of correctness (viz. truth) with the practical criterion of correctness (viz. reasonableness). The practical criterion, as Rawls shows, is more suitable to a liberal democratic political project than is the theoretical one.

In Progress

“Does Miscommunication Mitigate the Upshot of Diversity?” (revise and resubmit) — Employing an agent-based model, Keith Hankins, Ryan Muldoon, and I find that the benefits of diversity in complex problem-solving situations can withstand substantial miscommunication errors, but only with the right institutional background.