About
I'm a Philosophy Ph.D. candidate at University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research is specialized in ethics and metaphysics. I have primary research interests in harm, the ethics of self-defense, applied ethics, the metaphysics of causation, and their intersection.
Many find there to be an intuitive moral difference between doing harm and merely allowing harm. For example, it seems intuitively wrong to impose a harm on an innocent person to spare oneself from an equivalent harm, but it seems intuitively permissible to refuse to suffer a harm to spare another person from suffering an equivalent harm. Arguably. this distinction plays a crucial role at the foundation of the ethics of self- and other-defense. For example, refusing to suffer a harm to save an innocent other person does not seem to make us a permissible target of self-defense, but threatening to impose a harm on an innocent other person does seem to make us a permissible target of self-defense. On reflection, however, it’s not obvious why this distinction should hold.
My main research project aims to (i) develop a precise account of the notions of doing harm, enabling harm, and allowing harm, (ii) develop a framework that articulates and explains their ethical significance, and (iii) apply this framework to concrete, practical ethical issues.
Outside of my current primary research project, I have research intests in counterfactuals, causation, metaethics, and applied ethics more generally.
