research

My research is primarily in normative ethics and the ethics of technology.

Dissertation

• My dissertation concerns the nature and significance of privacy. I argue that the preeminent theories of privacy, control-based theories, are insufficient to capture the nature of the private sphere. Secondarily, I explore the role of privacy in social life and interpersonal relationships. I am most interested in theorizing about so-called ‘marginal’ privacy violations in a variety of contexts. Broadly speaking, I defend the view that such violations should be captured by the right to privacy. Within my dissertation, I am currently working on the following papers:

• Speculation & The Right to Privacy

  • This paper is about Taylor Swift. More specifically, this paper argues that public speculation about intimate topics can constitute a violation of privacy even when no novel sensitive information is revealed about a subject.

• We Should All Know Less About Each Other

  • This paper is about oversharing: both why we sometimes shouldn’t, and why norms around oversharing often involve pernicious bias against marginalized groups.

Other Projects

• A paper about algorithmic fairness

  • This paper argues that, contrary to popular trends in the AI fairness debate, we should be pluralists about algorithmic fairness metrics.

• A paper about animal oppression

  • This paper argues that adaptive preferences (as theorized by feminist philosophers) can be used to demonstrate why the preferences of domestic animals are sometimes less instructive than they appear.

• What Do We Gain From Mechanistic Interpretability?

  • This paper is a critique of the growing trend in AI research to mechanistically explain the behavior of LLMs.