Kim is strong-minded, empowered and rational save her desire for risky cosmetic surgeries. Why? Have her evaluative states been harmfully distorted, and should people intervene? The adaptive preferences (AP) literature's attempts to answer this have been criticized: misdiagnosing Kim's evaluative states is not only disrespectful of her rationality, but could also result in harmful interventions. This has led theorists like Serene Khader to call for a careful differentiation between the different reasons an agent perpetuates their own harm. But how exactly to draw this distinction remains a thorny problem.

I propose a novel solution to this problem that adapts fragmentation, a concept drawn from decision theory (Elga and Rayo 2022). On this account, not just practitioners, but Kim herself has the tools to autonomously evaluate and intervene on her adaptive preferences. By synthesizing two literatures, I provide resources that will be helpful to practitioners and theorists alike.  

Liberatory social movements succeed when subordinated groups challenge and materially change normalized injustices inflicted upon their group. Their success depends on individual agents collaborating in service of their group’s ends at great personal expense. Theorists of social change have grappled with how and why members from these subordinated groups become compelled to become agents of such “curious,” “strange” and “amazing” (per Foucault) collective change given the immense personal risks and costs of resistance.

Scholars like Mansbridge largely agree that this motivation to act for collective liberation is driven by the subordinated group's “oppositional consciousness,” a mental state that empowers and prepares group members to collectively resist. Inductive analyses of various historical movements show what constitutes fertile ground for the development of this oppositional consciousness.  Movements benefit from “free spaces”: unsupervised time and space for sharing experiences, developing collective identity, and reinterpreting their stories into directed narratives of injustice. In addition, conscious creativity helps group members collectively synthesize new symbols, solutions and schemas, and combine emotional and rational faculties to develop oppositional consciousness.

We argue that the practice of collective design (co-design) crucially drives the development of free spaces and conscious creativity, thus providing fertile ground to the growth of oppositional consciousness needed for sociopolitical empowerment. We combine insights from design thinkers and philosophers to argue for establishing a new practice of collective design among subordinated groups. As a new practice, it enables the community to both discover and create value, as well as both imagine and bring about new schemas of justice.

To inform our argument, we rely on our fieldwork with women in Colombia in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). As mostly informal workers in a dangerous and male-dominated industry, they face myriad injustices such as economic coercion, sexual violence and cartelization, which have been ignored or normalized by authorities. Through training around 20 women on co-design frameworks, we sowed the seeds of a practice of creative expression, problem identification, and solution generation. We show that, as the women have continued training and establishing design practices in their own communities, they have developed an oppositional consciousness, as evidenced by their forming a 300-strong union of solidarity with other female ASGM miners in Colombia, identifying the interconnected injustices they face, and calling for concrete, integrated strategies for securing justice and better conditions for their community.

Sophie de Grouchy’s social and legal philosophy has been deservedly getting more attention from the philosophical community. This paper shifts the spotlight onto her moral philosophy, which is inextricably intertwined with her legal and political views. 

Through a novel framing of her moral system as an `engine', I argue that her account captures the impartial egalitarianism in her consequentialism. Her system also evades anticipated pitfalls of her utilitarian contemporaries by combining it with the `common' accessibility of sentimentalism and the nurturing optimism of virtue ethics. I show how Grouchy embeds consequentialism within an accessible, socially rooted, and deeply humanist account of virtue. and therefore has an important place in the history of consequentialism and value theory writ large.

I presented this paper at the UT Austin Graduate Conference in Early Modern Philosophy 2022. Please contact me for a draft of the paper or for presentation materials!

With advocates ranging from feminist scholars to corporate DEI panelists, there has been a push to get marginalized groups ``a seat at the table,'' i.e. a position as a member of a group that makes decisions. I use network models to simulate the comparative efficacy of said seat at the table, depending on when the marginalized agent is given their seat at the table, i.e. allowed to communicate with the rest of the decision committee as a knower, and whether the committee also relies on predictive tools that aggregate past decisions.

I find that delaying the entrance of the seat at the table delays the overall time to convergence, and that this delay is exacerbated by the presence of the predictive tools. In addition, I monitor whether the extent at which the convergent belief differs from the marginalized agent's initial guess (the ``divergence'') depends on when the marginalized agent is given their seat on the table. I find that while the lateness does increase the divergence, the extent that the inequity is affected by the tardiness of the seat depends on the connectedness of the model as well as the presence of the predictive tool.

If the divergence itself is an injustice, then the delay and the presence of the algorithmic tools both exacerbate these harms. If the delay is in itself also a harm, then committees that delay their new members and also use these predictive tools will too be compounding the injustice.

This paper and model are still being actively workshopped, but please contact me for a draft of either! I've presented a version of this paper and model at the Machine Wisdom Workshop.