I am a postdoctoral fellow with David Enoch’s ‘Liberalism Rekindled’ Project with the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I specialize in political philosophy. I do ethics too.

Here are a few (but not all!) of my current projects:

1. Democratic Understanding

Some democratic theorists argue that democracy aims at understanding. However, democracies are made up of millions of citizens. Naturally, there are significant limits then to our capacities to understand our fellow citizens. Given this, what does it mean that we ought to try and understand them? And what does this say about the (epistemic) aim of democracy? While this should reveal a fatal flaw, or at least a severely unrealistic promise, to otherwise compelling defences of democracy, I argue that the limited understanding we have of our co-citizens should be viewed as a key part of their value. Democracies pool our interconnected, but partial and flawed, understandings of (usually) a small circle of people. These overlapping connections at the meso-level then scale up to democracy’s epistemic aims writ large.

‍2. Sentimentalizing Other People

This paper is about the value of sentimentalizing other people. Sentimentalizing others, or portraying them in a one-dimensional idealized light by way of affection, nostalgia, pity, and the like, is not, I argue against critics, always self-indulgent, nor necessarily harmful or by nature wrongful. Nor is it merely benign source of comfort to ourselves, one rooted in a harmless fiction about who people ‘really are’. Sentimentalizing others (at least certain others at certain times) can be good, even good for another’s sake, and can indeed reflect who people really are. To show this, I assess sentimentality according to its instrumental and non-instrumental value. Along the way, I rewire the phenomenology of sentimentalizing, depicting it as much more others-regarding than it has been construed as, and argue a stronger claim: that we have a relational obligation to sentimentalize certain others at certain times.

3. The Ethics of Proselytizing

A. Can Religious Proselytizers be Epistemically Harmed?

Religious proselytizing has a bad rap. This is, undoubtedly, at least partly for good reason. The attempt to convert another to one’s own religion can go terribly wrong. However, simply attempting to convince someone of the truth of one’s beliefs cannot be intrinsically wrong. Accepting this, I ask a question ignored by those writing on the ethics of proselytizing, who focus mostly on how the proselytizee can be wronged or harmed in instances of proselytizing. I ask instead how the proselytizer, when misunderstood, or something in this vein, can be wronged or harmed, and so consider how proselytizing can go wrong in the opposite direction.

B. In Good Faith: What is wrong with religious proselytizing?

Philosophers writing on proselytizing regard proselytizing as wrongful because it is thought to be wrong to impose our beliefs on another.  I instead consider, through a novel interpretation of John Locke’s case for toleration (Vernon 2021), that proselytizing is wrongful, and more gravely so, because in attempting to change another’s beliefs, we are attempting to change who another is, particularly with respect to their ‘temperament’.

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I also like to hike, do yoga, listen to records, and bake (I’m not very good at it though).