Philosophy, Ethics, Society, and Technology

Ethics and technology is a booming area of philosophical and interdisciplinary research. It is diverse, rewarding, and increasingly socially valuable. Given the size and scope of this research, it is difficult to articulate how one carves out a niche in this literature.

My own approach to this literature focuses on three central issues and their intersections. First, how do we develop technologies in a responsible way that ensures some level of safeguarding and protection? Digital technologies develop and see increased proliferation in use very quickly; sometimes the creation and proliferation of a technology has serious consequences and requires consideration during development, rather than after the genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Second, how does the widespread adoption of a particular technology create or change patterns of human behavior? In areas like digital communication and transportation technologies, this is a significant question and one that we take very seriously. However, there are other areas like patterns of commerce, the creation of illicit markets, and other considerations that we need to consider more carefully with the development of particular technologies, especially as the last three decades have shown the economic impact on changing economies through “disruption” of traditional industries and (as a result) changed the relationships and compensation between labor forces. Third, what sorts of responses can society have in order to limit potential harms around technologies? Often we think of harms done by using technology (e.g., managing emission standards), but we also have to recognize that creating certain technologies at scale requires recognizing safeguards too, whether that’s the prospect of environmental damage or exploitative mining to get essential minerals needed to produce those products. These sorts of considerations need to be addressed across the production process.

I publish on these subjects across a wide range of public and academic publications.

Philosophy and Economics

Since graduate school, much of my work has been focused on the influence and coordination of social behavior. This comes out of my interest in metaethics, in the significant contemporary literature on practical reasons and rationality. This includes both the ethical questions themselves (how ought we treat each other) and the political questions (what kind of social order should we have to best ensure people are treated rightly). These questions are part of an extensive overlapping literature across the history of philosophy. Aristotle dedicated work in Politics and Nichomachean Ethics to the interrelation between the ethical obligations of and to individuals, the role of the state, and the nature of political authority and law; Kant dedicates large portions of his work on the nature of human rationality and ethics to the entanglement of practical reasoning with moral reasoning, and the structure of categorical and hypothetical judgments. More recently and influentially for me is the contemporary tradition in the philosophy of law; Hart, Raz, O’Neill, Walzer, among others.

My work in philosophy of economics came out of a recognition that the explicit public deliberation and process of creating regulative norms essential to the philosophy of law is robust, but the treatment of social coordination that comes out of aggregated collections of individual rational and quasi-rational decision making is less explicitly handled. There are a range of problems in the background theory of economics (especially) and other areas of social life that do not have the direct deliberative structure of law, but still have to be treated as a part of how we understand and coordinate human social behavior. Economic activity has norms and regulations, but these are often treated in terms of law, rather than recognizing the broader implications and sources of influence which can act on these things. My major goal is to try and bridge the gap between moral and political theory of economics and the more sophisticated framework developed through the metaethics and philosophy of law, bringing that framework to bear on the economic theory.

History, Sociology, and Philosophy in the Martial Arts

I started practicing martial arts as a teenager, finding my way into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, then a range of other martial arts including judo, sambo, and muay thai. There’s so much history in the martial arts; the history has different levels of credibility. All martial arts are theories of combat, of what fights look like and how to win. Exploring the history and theory is part of the fun for me, part of why I love practicing the martial arts. There was a brief period early in graduate school where I was writing on the philosophy and history of the martial arts, and I’m returning to those in the near future. I hope to put out a first book on the subject in the near future, and am actively seeking a major publisher for the book.

In the meantime, I’m writing on these subjects at my substack, Grappling with Ideas.

Jewish Life and Antisemitism in Pluralist Democracies

I attended a Catholic high school while getting in touch with my Jewish religious background. Even as a young student, I was involved with efforts to build bridges between religious communities. As an undergraduate at Fresno State, I was involved in the creation of the Jewish Studies Association, a student organization that has since developed into a certificate=granting program at the University. I also worked on antisemitism and anti-Jewish attitudes in the local Christian community as a researcher on a grant for the National Endowment for the Humanities. When I moved to New York for graduate school, I bracketed this area to focus on others, but while doing my doctoral work in Calgary, the sudden increase in antisemitic hate crimes led me to turn my attention back to issues of antisemitism, extremism, and conspiracy theories in political democracies.

The Jewish diaspora community (like other diaspora communities) is a perpetual minority. Many of the places where there are large Jewish diaspora populations have large Christian (or secular, but historically Christian) majorities. The result is that the Jewish community frequently has to continually and actively address antisemitic attitudes and threats which have come from those communities for centuries, even as Christian groups have worked to remove antisemitic extremism from their communities. My current research program focuses on how Christian and Jewish communities can work together to combat antisemitic extremism, while negotiating the challenges that come with being a religious minority in societies which endorse, but don’t always adhere to, religious pluralism.