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I work on structural injustice and on the moral limits of markets. The two literatures turn out to share a question: what happens to our central normative concepts — responsibility, blame, exploitation, freedom — when the thing being evaluated is a large-scale social arrangement rather than a person? Our ordinary moral vocabulary is built for agents and actions, and it strains when we turn it on institutions, markets, and structures. Much of my work asks how political philosophy should be rebuilt to handle that shift of scale, and what a liberalism adequate to the institutions we actually cooperate through would look like. I also have a standing interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in idealization and modeling in the philosophy of science and their links to methods in political theory.
David Estlund argues that theories of structural injustice have to show how victims can have warranted grievances, generally expressed through reactive attitudes. But he argues that no social structure can by itself be the target of warranted grievance. We argue that warrant for reactive attitudes is an inappropriate standard to hold theories of structural injustice to, because reactive attitudes are tightly connected to the mental states that motivate actions. This connection entails that reactive attitudes presuppose that agents are the perpetrators of injustice. But the point of the idea of structural injustice is that this presupposition is often unwarranted.
What features of structural injustice distinguish it from mere collections of injustices committed by individuals? I argue that the standard model of moral judgment that centers agents and actions fails to adequately articulate what's gone wrong in cases of structural injustice. It fails because features of the social world that arise only at large scale are normatively salient, but unaccounted for by the standard model. I illustrate these features with historical examples of normatively-different outcomes driven by institutional structure rather, holding fixed characteristics of agents' motivations. I then defend the view from reductionist objections.
"Structural Injustice" refers to injustices that can't be attributed to particular actions by bad actors. This article surveys Iris Marion Young's influential account of structural injustice; lays out some considerations related to the concept's use as an analytical tool; and critically surveys Young's account of individual responsibility for structural injustice.
Egalitarian defenses of urban growth controls are self-undermining. The participatory mechanisms that sustain growth controls violate the political equality that justifies democratic procedure in the first place.
I argue that alienation objections to housing markets face a dilemma. Either they purport to explain distributive injustices, or they hold that markets are objectionable on intrinsic grounds. The first disjunct is empirically dubious. The second undermines the motivation for objecting to housing markets, and overgeneralizes: if markets are objectionable due to alienation, so is all large-scale social cooperation.
Philosophical arguments about government contracting either categorically oppose it on legitimacy grounds or see it as largely anodyne. I argue for a normatively distinct kind of contracting — the advance market commitment, or AMC — and show that it is justified by the same liberal values that justify the welfare state.
I argue that contemporary accounts of ideology critique—paradigmatically those advanced by Haslanger, Jaeggi, Celikates, and Stanley—are either inadequate or redundant. The Marxian concept of ideology—a collective epistemic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements—has recently returned to the forefront of debates in contemporary analytic social philosophy. Ideology critique has similarly emerged as a technique for combating such social ills by remedying those collective epistemic distortions. Ideologies are sets of social meanings or shared understandings. I argue in this paper that because agents must coordinate on them to be mutually intelligible, ideologies, on the fashionable contemporary account, are conventions. They are equilibrium solutions to a particular kind of social coordination problem. The worry is that changing pernicious conventions requires more than the epistemic remedy contemporary critical social theorists prescribe. It also requires overcoming strategic impediments like high first-mover costs. Thus contemporary proponents of ideology critique—the "new ideology critics," as I'll call them—face a dilemma. Either their account of social change fails to account for important strategic impediments to social change, in which case it is inadequate, or it incorporates a theory of strategic behavior, and thus merely reinvents the wheel, poorly. It adds nothing to prominent convention-based accounts of social change in the social sciences. More generally, this is an example of a pernicious trend in contemporary critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theorists have abandoned their predecessors' commitment to engaging with social science, thereby undermining their efforts.
These lines of work converge on a longer-term, book-length project on liberalism and market governance — an account of the state's role in making and shaping the markets we cooperate through, organized around the idea that liberal institutions earn their justification by converting zero-sum conflict into positive-sum cooperation. Its first piece, the still-early "In Defense of Central Planning," reconsiders what "planning" can mean for a liberal state: building the infrastructure and market structure within which private actors coordinate, as against central direction of outcomes. Related future work includes a common normative framework for market-making in transportation and electricity policy.