Research

Books

Striving: The Agency and Epistemology of Uncertain Pursuits with Sarah Paul · Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2027 Moving Up Without Losing Your Way Princeton University Press, 2019 Frederic W. Ness Book Award

Articles & chapters

• “Precarity and the Social Contract” (Work in progress; draft available upon request)

  Abstract

  Prospective agency—the capacity to set ends far in the future, plan for them, and prioritize them in action—is presupposed by the social contract tradition, both in its account of how principles are justified and in its account of what sustains institutions. But this capacity is fragile: it is rational only against background conditions of security and stability. Under conditions of precarity, agents are rational to focus on the short term. The tradition therefore faces a dilemma: either it assumes that these conditions obtain, in which case the account of legitimacy is incomplete, or it relegates them to non-ideal theory but provides no guidance when securing those conditions conflicts with what ideal theory recommends. I argue that securing the conditions of prospective agency is the first task of politics. Unlike realist defenses of the priority of security and stability, my argument is derived from assumptions internal to the social contract tradition.
• “Is Precarious Work Objectionable?” (Work in progress; draft available upon request)

  Abstract

  Precarious work is often seen as a paradigmatic kind of ‘bad’ work. In this paper, I argue that whether precarious employment leads to objectionable precarity in people’s lives depends on a contingent feature of how work mediates our access to many goods beyond income. I motivate a distinction between terms-and-conditions precarity and precarity-causing work. I conclude that domination and inequality in prospective agency cannot give us a fully satisfying account of the badness of terms-and-conditions precarious work because they obscure the role that work’s centrality plays in leading to broadscale precarity. Work’s centrality makes “good work” a bottleneck to the many goods beyond income that are a part of a flourishing life. If this argument is right, we can address the badness of precarious work by either making it less precarious or by making it less central. This paper makes the case for this second, often neglected way of addressing the badness of precarious work.
• “Beyond the Threshold: Prospective Agency and Institutions.” [Commentary on Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model] Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
• “Intellectual Diversity and the Mission of Higher Education.” Radcliffe White Paper (with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Julie A. Reuben, Keith Whittington, et al.).
• “A Teacher’s Dilemma: Balancing High Expectations with Evidence.” The Aquinas Lectures 2025, Marquette University Press.
• “Trapped in the Present: Poverty and the Undermining of Prospective Agency.” Political.
• “Educational Case Studies and Speaking for Others.” Educational Theory.
• “Can Driver’s Civic Education Model Circumvent Partisanship?” In Civic Education in Polarized Times: NOMOS LXVI, eds. Elizabeth Beaumont and Eric Beerbohm, New York University Press.
• “Inequality in Planning Capacity.” Journal of Applied Philosophy.
• “The Costs of Higher Education.” In Handbook of Philosophy of Education, ed. Randall Curren, Routledge.
• “Resisting Pessimism Traps: The Limits of Believing in Oneself.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
• “The Moral Psychology of Poverty.” Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, Oxford University Press.
• “Institutional Inequality.” In Academic Ethics Today: Problems, Policies, and Prospects for University Life, ed. Steven Cahn, Rowman & Littlefield.
• “Practical Reasoning” (with Jules Salomone-Sehr). In Handbook of Practical Reasoning, ed. Luca Ferrero, Routledge.
• “The Costs of Consciousness Raising.” Philosophy of Education.
• “Flourishing in the Academy: Complicity and Compromise.” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy.
• “Response to Critics.” Book symposium on Moving Up Without Losing Your Way, Studies in Philosophy and Education.
• “Reimagining the Higher Education Narrative.” In Dilemmas of Freedom and Inclusion in Higher Education: Cases and Commentaries, eds. Rebecca Taylor and Ashley Kuntz, Harvard Education Press.
• “The Miseducation of the Elite.” Journal of Political Philosophy.
• “Norms of Practical Reasoning” (with Sarah Paul). In Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, eds. Ruth Chang and Kurt Sylvan, Routledge.
• “Grit.” (With Sarah Paul.) Ethics. [Philosopher’s Annual 2019]
• “Mitigating Ethical Costs in the Classroom.” Daedalus.
• “Believing in Others.” (With Sarah Paul.) Philosophical Topics.
• “The Ethical Stakes of Collaborative Community-Based Social Science Research” (with Ronald David Glass, Joyce E. King, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Michele S. Moses, Sheeva Sabati, and Troy Richardson). Urban Education.
• “Reasoning Under Scarcity.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. [Best AJP Paper Award]
• “The Educator’s Dual Role.” Educational Theory.
• “Unequal Classrooms.” Philosophical Inquiry in Education.
• “Boston Public School Lottery: What Should We Take for Granted?” In Dilemmas of Educational Justice: Cases and Commentaries, eds. Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, Harvard Education Press.
• “Molding Conscientious, Hard-Working, and Perseverant Students.” Social Philosophy and Policy.
• “Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap.” Journal of Political Philosophy.
• “Deliberating for Our Far Future Selves.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
• “Towards an Ecological Theory of the Norms of Practical Deliberation.” European Journal of Philosophy.
• “The Non-Cognitive Challenge to a Liberal Egalitarian Education.” Theory and Research in Education.