Research

Overview

I specialize in the philosophy of mind, with a particular emphasis on questions of philosophical psychology. Central to my work is the question, “how do beliefs cause action, and vice versa?”, which I approach from an interdisciplinary, empirically-informed, Jamesean perspective. I argue that emotions and social context are more important to causal accounts of action than typically supposed, and that these features help explain why rational discourse often fails to persuade others on ethical issues. Changing a belief and changing behaviour are different things.

More recently, I’ve been applying this framework to issues in digital ethics and artificial intelligence.

Online modes of discourse present unique challenges for how we conceive of the exchange of ideas and how beliefs can lead to action. The opacity of our interlocutor’s motives, the disproportionate ratio between how long something lasts on the internet and how much thought was put into it, and the bottomless race to simplicity are all barriers to effective communication on the digital platforms where most online discourse occurs. We need to understand how these factors work with or against each other if we ever want to see the marketplace of ideas that the internet was supposed to be.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence only complicates this problem, while bringing with it problems of its own. I am fascinated by questions of how AI systems are considered analogous to human systems, and the conceptual heavy lifting done by the repeated use of those analogies. We need to understand how the analogies we use to explain AI systems do shape beliefs about what AI systems are.

Most Recent Projects

How to Survive Online

This is a textbook on digital ethics aimed at lower-level undergraduates and community college students. It covers many topics of vital importance for being an informed and conscientious online citizen, such as: online relationships, influencer culture, algorithmic content delivery, trolling & ragebaiting, misinformation & propaganda, and more.

This book is under contract (Broadview Press), due at the end of 2027.

Paper 01 – AI and action theory

In this paper, I argue that all AI-mediated actions are necessarily deviant, either practically (weak case) or conceptually (strong case). Given the source of this deviance, the onus is on those who want to introduce AI systems into morally significant situations, and not those who wish to restrict it.

This paper is currently under consideration for publication.

Paper 02 – AI and effort

In this paper, I argue that inferring reliability from effort is warranted in the human case, but not in the AI case. The effort setting found in AI systems equivocates on the term ‘effort’ to give an illusion of agency, where none exists. This is especially problematic for those already in a poor epistemic position to judge an AI system’s output.

This paper will be submitted for consideration in Fall 2026.

Paper 03 – Ethics of Trolling

In this paper, I argue that the main harm in trolling is that on the epistemic conditions to which it leads, especially by way of a polluted information space. The only case where trolling can be ethical is that of countertrolling, or ‘white-hat trolling’, where people use trolling to improve the information space by making unethical trolls less effective.