Research

My research brings political philosophy to bear on problems often treated as apolitical matters of applied ethics. It then uses these findings to challenge and refine prevailing theories in political philosophy. Decisions faced by businesses, engineers, philanthropists, and AI models frequently carry underappreciated assumptions about, or implications for, the legitimacy of power and authority, the distribution of benefits and burdens, and the institutional division of labor. I seek to expose these assumptions and place policy choices and institutions on stronger conceptual and normative foundations. Most of my work is available in open-access repositories such as PhilPapers, ResearchGate, and SSRN.

AI and Democratic Legitimacy

My latest book, Recoding Democracy: AI and the Fight for Our Democratic Future (Polity, 2026), argues for both recoding AI to support democracy and recoding our understanding of democracy to confront AI's challenges. I claim that democratizing AI is not about widening consumer access to AI tools, securing the geopolitical dominance of nominally democratic regimes, or encouraging stakeholder input in the training of AI models; rather, it is about ensuring that citizens enjoy fair opportunities for ongoing and deliberative public oversight of AI. I reject views that see AI-enabled direct democracy as the apotheosis of collective self-government and instead defend an AI-augmented vision of representative democracy. I show that AI reveals the limits of leading instrumental and noninstrumental arguments for democracy's justification, and I chart a course for strengthening the philosophical case for democracy against "algocracy." Most boldly, I explore the possibility of AI citizenship and grapple with problems of political justice among natural and artificial citizens.

Related work can be found in:

• "The Perfect Politician" (in AI Morality, edited by David Edmonds), which shows how recent proposals to integrate AI into the democratic process rely on controversial assumptions about democracy's value.

• "Integrity, Artificial Agency, and Democratic Legitimacy," forthcoming in Philosophia, which considers how the political virtue of integrity bears on the training and governance of AI models.

• "The Concept of Accountability in AI Ethics and Governance" (The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance), which seeks to provide conceptual clarity on the oft-confused notion of accountability.

• "Combating Disinformation with AI: Epistemic and Ethical Challenges," an IEEE conference paper written with Benjamin Lange.

Authority and Standing Among Human and Artificial Reasoners

My next major project, "Artificial Authority," takes up Recoding Democracy's most daring and demanding further questions about how political power should be shared among human, hybrid, and artificial agents. It also brings political philosophy into contact with bioethics and the philosophy of mind. The project starts from two motivating concerns. The first is that AI systems could cognitively outmatch humans even while remaining formally under human control. The second is that some systems could qualify as political agents with standing of their own. The first raises questions about the conditions under which human citizens can meaningfully scrutinize and contest political decisions. The second raises questions about who may belong to the political community and claim a share of its authority. My initial work on these questions has enjoyed support from a Digital Sentience Fellowship funded by Longview Philanthropy.

Responsibilities of Private Organizations

A longstanding research stream concerns what private organizations owe to society and where their discretion ends, since private resources do not entitle firms, foundations, or other organizations to settle public questions that belong to citizens and their governments. One branch concerns the conditions under which technology companies have duties to police the sales and usage of their products. When can technology firms be complicit in the misuse or abuse of the products they sell? Conversely, when can efforts by technology firms to control sales and usage constitute abuses of power? "Ethical Safeguards for Sales of Weaponizable Technology" (with B. J. Strawser and David Whetham) develops an operational framework in answer to these questions, and a paper under review provides the deeper philosophical foundations of this framework.

Another branch addresses how benevolent economic practices, such as philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and social enterprise, can both support and undermine the realization of justice and political equality. My first book, The Tyranny of Generosity (Oxford University Press, 2022), received an honorable mention for the ECPR Political Theory Prize, and I coauthored the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on philanthropy with Emma Saunders-Hastings and Rob Reich. In the book and in related work on effective altruism and the nonprofit sector, I show how actions praiseworthy from the perspective of interpersonal morality become far more complicated from the perspective of political morality. Other papers examine the ethics of boycotting by corporations (with Ryan Jenkins and B. J. Strawser) and the relationship between justice and social enterprises (with Johanna Mair).

Wider Interests

I have published on the question of practice-dependence in theories of justice, that is, the extent to which theories of justice should be constrained by facts about existing practices, a question I connect to debates in medieval political thought. I maintain general interests in the justification of democracy, methods of ethical foresight analysis, the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory, the site and scope of distributive justice, and the institutional implications of theories of justice.

I am also developing a separate research program, tentatively called "The Normative Knowledge Project," concerning how philosophy can responsibly guide public and professional judgment. It begins from my observation that audiences often want to know how accumulated philosophical wisdom bears on urgent practical questions, while philosophers tend to present their field through its debates. I am interested in how the concept of "settled science" translates to normative theory. My hypothesis is that there is more tacit agreement on certain questions than philosophers tend to realize or communicate. Yet normative inquiry produces heterogeneous kinds of achievement, so no single notion of consensus can serve as a master variable, and an audience's intended use of any achievement shapes how philosophers should present it.