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

I live in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

I specialize in political and feminist philosophy. I am mainly concerned with why citizens, and persons more generally, ought to better understand one another, and how they should do so.

My current research has two main components: 

      1. Understanding and Democracy

A. Knowing (with) Other Citizens

This project concerns what citizens ought to know to be competent political agents in a world rife with disinformation and informational burdens. Usually the picture of what citizens know is quite bleak. Citizens, as is perhaps unsurprising, are often rather ill-informed on matters of politics. I argue that there is nonetheless good news on this front. Citizens possess a kind of knowledge—knowledge of other persons— that constitutes their politically-salient competency to consider others.

B. The Possibility of Democratic Empathy

This project concerns how democracies pool our different capacities to empathize uniquely for different persons, dependent on how we know and understand them. I aim to develop a picture of the value of democracy that hangs not on individuals representing their own interests, nor the common good, but the pooling of our interpersonal interests and the overlap of our interpersonal relations.

2. The Ethics of Proselytizing

A. Can Religious Proselytizers be Epistemically Harmed?

Proselytizing has a bad rap. It is often thought to be intrinsically arrogant, coercive, paternalistic, or some such. I argue that this is not the case. Stronger than this, I argue that these charges—that there is something intrinsically wrong with attempting to change another’s beliefs— can thwart proselytizers opportunities to convince others of the truth of their beliefs by of rational argumentation.

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

Since proselytizing is not right or wrong in and of itself, I argue that when it is wrong, this is for the same reason that being fully honest with those we love; sometimes we have a duty to withhold the whole truth from them.

3. Other

Sentimentality in Love: Against the idea that sentimentalizing other people is wrongful, I argue that sentimentalizing other people has instrumental and non-instrumental value, and can, perhaps surprisingly, be fitting to it’s object.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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