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My scholarship includes two areas of research in political theory/philosophy: 1) Democratic theory and the ethics of participation and 2) Theories of justice and equality, with an emphasis on the philosophy of labor. I am also interested in the connections between these two areas of inquiry. I have spent time thinking and writing on the requirements of democratic equality regarding the value of social contributions by fellow citizens. I have also (critically) written about the role of Basic Income and other policy proposals for democratic justice and the future of work.
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My book The Duty To Vote (Oxford University Press) is my latest published large project on democratic theory and mass-participation.
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The book investigates whether voting should be seen as an ethical duty or a mere right. I explore the foundations of various democratic traditions and their differing perspectives on the morality of voting. My central claim is that competent voting should be seen as grounded in a justice duty " of common pursuit" to support good governance and help our fellow citizens minimize injustice (see my Washington Post pieces here and here). In this way, the book underscores the connection that exists between democratic theory and the ethics of cooperative action. My work on voting ethics also includes several pieces that precede the book. In one of them, I explore the ( limited) epistemic advantages of majority rule.
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See Will McCormack's review of my book in the New Republic here
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See Tom Christiano's review of my book in Analysis here
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See The Review of Politics on my book here
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See The Journal of Value Inquiry on my book here
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See my AEON piece on the ethics of voting and democracy here
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See my invited contribution to the Philosophers Magazine here
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See my Political Studies article reprinted in The Democracy Reader, co-edited by Bob Talisse
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My book Dialogues in Democracy (by invitation from Routledge Philosophy) is forthcoming in December of 2024. In it, I survey and analyze criticisms to the democratic ideal from elitist as well as radical corners. The writing is structured in the background of a Socratic dialogue of sorts, in which the narrator describes reasons for valuing democracy as well as different understandings of the ideal and its institutional implications. Her main task is to respond to the critical questions posed by three “objectors” that interrupt her explications. There are three objectors in the dialogue because I concentrate on three general critical challenges to democracy: The elitist one (suspicious of the people’s capacities to self-govern), the lottocratic one (suspicious of elections and supportive of randomized mechanisms to choose public officials), and the egalitarian-participatory one (suspicious of non-inclusionary representation and sympathetic to more direct participation and power-altering institutions). Some objections straddle these lines and are offered by any one one of the three critics. The three critics’ names are Platinicus, Lotto, and Inclusivus.
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My research also includes work on distributive justice and welfare state philosophy. In my book Self-Realization and Justice: A Liberal Perfectionist Defense of Freedom from Employment (Routledge Studies in Philosophy), I explore the ethics of a right to meaningful leisure from an Aristotelian perspective-- also informed by the thought of Karl Marx and JS Mill-- and its possible implementation in the form of a Basic Income and a Participation Income. In the backdrop of contemporary theories of equality, my first book suggests that we should view self-realization (inspired by the notion of "eudaimonia") as an object of fair distribution in society. The book asks: How can society be rearranged so as to make social contribution compatible with self-realization? My approach offers a critical view of capitalist markets that distribute the value of estimable activities unjustly and undervalue useful contributions outside of paid employment; but it also sets itself apart from value neutrality approaches that highlight a right "to go surfing." My work on Labor and Justice also includes an account of why a uniform Basic Income is inconsistent with justice since the wealthy do not deserve or need assistance from the State.
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Read a review of my book and work in Philosophical Disquisitions
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Read a review of my book in The Review of Politics
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Read a review of my book in Basic Income Studies
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I am also the co-editor of Rationality, Democracy, and Justice: The Legacy of Jon Elster (Cambridge University Press), and I am the author of a chapter on gender justice
and preference formation in the volume. The book collects essays by some of the most influential minds in Political Science, Philosophy, Economics, and Law today
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I am now also working on a book project titled: Democracy and Genuine Concern: A Justification. In it, I offer a novel justification of democracy understood as a conduit for the citizen virtues of benevolence and genuine concern for others. The book criticizes public reason and procedural equality accounts of democratic value for being insufficiently attuned to the importance of avoiding attitudes of indifference that are still compatible with norms of basic respect and with duties of civility in deliberation. The book also scrutinizes theories of relational equality as essential to democracy that focus on equal political power as a requisite of living as equals, but that neglect to theorize on attitudes of concern beyond that basic requirement of political equality. A central task in the book is to distinguish benevolence and genuine concern for others in politics from intimate care, on the one hand, and from utilitarian welfarism, on the other. I conceptualize the attitudes of benevolence and genuine citizen concern for others as non- specific person relative but still based on worthy moral emotions. In the light of philosopher of race Jorge Garcia's thesis that racism is a " vice of the heart", I propose that citizen indifference should also be understood in similar terms, as a civic vice. The book examines how institutions and social structures can shape citizen attitudes, however. The main take away from the book is that democracy is valuable because it helps us fulfill duties of substantive concern and aid, which go beyond duties of tolerance and civility. I conceptualize these duties as based on our capacity to act collectively via democratic institutions and arrangements. In this sense, my account of political participation differs from approaches that justify political action as a duty to avoid complicity for state wrongdoing and injustice. Although these compensatory obligations are justified and welcome, we have duties towards fellow citizens that are based on less self-indulgent considerations. We ought to have concern for others for their own sake whether or not our hands are dirty.
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My piece "Civic Virtue and Others-Oriented Action" is related to this larger project.​ The book project is a natural outgrowth of my work on voting and collective action but it seeks to offer a more encompassing normative account of the value of democracy and our participatory duties in it.
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As part pf my scholarship on the philosophy of labor, I am also working on a very incipient project tentatively titled The Value of Work and What We Owe for It. The project examines the relationship between work and justice in compensation for its social contribution. I seek to understand what renders a social contribution socially necessary or desirable, and how we should compensate it based on these considerations. What makes a job socially necessary or desirable in a way that others are not? Challenging prevalent philosophical understandings of the (ideally competitive) market as a reliable source of knowledge for what renders compensation just or deserved, I suggest a return to "just price theory" to help us determine what fair pay really is. My arguments, however, operate under widely accepted modern principles of market economics. I argue that these precepts are not inconsistent with objective views of value encapsulated in just price theory, as medieval and classic thinkers gave us evidence to think. Inspired by the "Bullshit Jobs" idea, I examine the philosophical basis for thinking that some deserve better compensation than others for their contributions to economic activity and why. The project is tied to my piece, titled "Justice and Contribution: A Narrow Argument for Living Wages," in The Journal of Philosophy (2023), in which I argue that fair play duties require society to pay decent wages to workers that make essential contributions to society by enabling fellow citizens to be free in a fundamental sense, namely, by saving them the need to toil to survive. My book project fits with recent work on "contributive justice" in the egalitarian literature as well as with historical discussions about the basis of desert and other rival considerations used to justify compensation for our contributions to society.
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