Welcome to my website. I’m a political theorist affiliated with the Australian National University, where I am a Visitor in Philosophy, and the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where I teach in Humanities and Social Sciences. I was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at Princeton. I have a PhD in Government from Cornell, where I was supervised by Richard W. Miller. My initial academic training was in economics and international relations, and I continue to engage social science in my research, which concerns ethical questions that arise in economic life, both domestically and across international borders.
In public discourse, economic life is invariably evaluated with a distributive lens. Yet no objection to inequality is likely to gain much purchase in the real world unless it can explicate what is objectionable about the social processes that produce, and relations that maintain, inequality. In my research, then, I adopt a "processual" standpoint, seeking to better understand which uses and forms of power—including those that are a function of authority or status—are unjust despite their coherence with the prohibitions on force and fraud that comprise the market sphere. Rather than focusing only on the political order undergirding economic life, as do most theorists, I bring political concepts to bear on the latter: asking, for example, how the neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination can help us better appreciate what is worrisome about market power, and whether the liberal-egalitarian norm of non-discrimination can assist us in interpreting the World Trade Organization's pillar of most-favored-nation treatment (MFN). I am also interested in how best to integrate power, authority, and status into our distributive metric alongside income and wealth, as well as in the scope of the market, particularly given its potential to undermine our propensity to engage in the kind of team-reasoning often instrumental to dissolve collective action dilemmas.
I'm currently writing a book that, in drawing an analogy between the market and a liberal international order (in which states trade market-access concessions, rather than coercing them) applies a processual lens to the second-order domain that determines the extent and pattern of trade integration across borders. However, I depart from the World Trade Organization’s standing norms of MFN and concession reciprocity in defending an ideal that, if adhered to, would result in greater market access on the part of, and greater policy flexibility for, poorer countries.
In addition to trade and economic globalization, my other policy interests include: climate justice, minimum wage laws, the UBI (unconditional basic income), tradeable pollution permits, effective altruism, intellectual property and workplace democracy. My broader academic interests include: global justice, relational egalitarianism, property-owning democracy, conceptions of freedom, neo-republicanism, the history of political thought, moral psychology, behavioral economics, economic sociology, the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, analytical Marxism, game theory, development economics and international relations theory.
In public discourse, economic life is invariably evaluated with a distributive lens. Yet no objection to inequality is likely to gain much purchase in the real world unless it can explicate what is objectionable about the social processes that produce, and relations that maintain, inequality. In my research, then, I adopt a "processual" standpoint, seeking to better understand which uses and forms of power—including those that are a function of authority or status—are unjust despite their coherence with the prohibitions on force and fraud that comprise the market sphere. Rather than focusing only on the political order undergirding economic life, as do most theorists, I bring political concepts to bear on the latter: asking, for example, how the neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination can help us better appreciate what is worrisome about market power, and whether the liberal-egalitarian norm of non-discrimination can assist us in interpreting the World Trade Organization's pillar of most-favored-nation treatment (MFN). I am also interested in how best to integrate power, authority, and status into our distributive metric alongside income and wealth, as well as in the scope of the market, particularly given its potential to undermine our propensity to engage in the kind of team-reasoning often instrumental to dissolve collective action dilemmas.
I'm currently writing a book that, in drawing an analogy between the market and a liberal international order (in which states trade market-access concessions, rather than coercing them) applies a processual lens to the second-order domain that determines the extent and pattern of trade integration across borders. However, I depart from the World Trade Organization’s standing norms of MFN and concession reciprocity in defending an ideal that, if adhered to, would result in greater market access on the part of, and greater policy flexibility for, poorer countries.
In addition to trade and economic globalization, my other policy interests include: climate justice, minimum wage laws, the UBI (unconditional basic income), tradeable pollution permits, effective altruism, intellectual property and workplace democracy. My broader academic interests include: global justice, relational egalitarianism, property-owning democracy, conceptions of freedom, neo-republicanism, the history of political thought, moral psychology, behavioral economics, economic sociology, the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, analytical Marxism, game theory, development economics and international relations theory.
