Research
I work on AI welfare, the ethics of systemic evaluation, and the practices of AI research itself.
AI Welfare
The Welfare-Unit Question
If AI systems have welfare, what's the welfare-bearer: the model, the instance running right now, the persona it's performing? Or something else?
Hedonic and Achievement Welfare
In Progress
AI welfare debates can get stuck on consciousness, the hardest part to resolve. But consciousness is only one route to welfare. Other routes like goal achievement don't require resolving consciousness.
Ethics of Systemic Evaluation
"When (If Ever) is AI Non-Consequentialist?"
In Progress
A paper for engineers examining whether and when AI systems can be said to operate non-consequentially. Mounts a consequentialist argument for non-consequentialist machine ethics.
Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2024
Some political riots are morally justified, not just excused. My reading: political rioters aren't revolutionaries; they are visibly uncivil toward the state to demand fuller inclusion in it.
“Mutual Aid as Effective Altruism”
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2023
Donating to charities is nice, but keeps effective altruists on the “firefighter’s treadmill” rushing from one rescue to the next. Mutual aid is a more politically serious framework for long-term effectiveness.
“What’s the Appropriate Target of Allocative Justification?”
AJOB Neuroscience, 2021
A critique of reducing medical resource allocation to QALY-maximization, without concern for distribution. We can't abstract away from patients as the proper objects of care like this.
AI Research
In Progress
The first extensive benchmark for fatphobia in LLMs, a surprising oversight. Hand-coded pilots feeding an interatively developed coding scheme.
“How Fairness Metrics Reshape What Counts as Fair”
In Progress
Ambitious scoping review of every(!) fairness metric paper from 2025. There's about one new fairness metric a day released on arXiv.
“Assessing Wonder at Scale: LLM-as-a-Judge for Qualitative Research”
In Progress
We use LLM-as-a-Judge to make subtle judgments of medical school applicants’ Wonder Essays. We've learned a lot about applicants, wonder, and the future of qualitative research.
Teaching Philosophy, 2024
We should teach students to write with ChatGPT rather than banning it. In true philosophical fashion, I defend dialogical writing (with an LLM) as not inherently inferior to monological writing (alone).
Public-Facing Work
Pedagogical Resource, 2026
“Why should your students do the work?”
American Philosophical Association Blog, 2025
American Philosophical Association Blog Bioethics Series, 2025
“How to Form a Lasting Undergraduate Philosophy Club”
American Philosophical Association Blog, 2021
“Coronavirus Is Everyone’s Problem, But Not Everyone’s Problem to Solve”
American Philosophical Association Blog, 2020
Check out my blog Rapid Fire, and my work at Flourish-A-Thon and philosophy for humans!