Research
Research
I'm interested in the ways in which non-ideal conditions of oppression affect the moral lives of agents living under them. Oppression penetrates, infects, and distorts our moral landscape in ways that are often not captured by existing dominant concepts and frameworks in moral philosophy. My research focuses particularly on duties to resist oppression: the nature of these duties, which agents come to bear such duties, and how we ought to respond to agents who fail to fulfil them. This work falls primarily within the intersections of social and political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. My dissertation is advised by Serene Khader.
I also work on aesthetics, particularly feminist aesthetics and the relationship between art and morality.
Forthcoming. “Who Has Duties to Resist Oppression?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the literature on victims’ duties to resist their own oppression has not paid enough attention to the heterogeneity of victims and how this affects their duties. The main aim of this paper is to introduce considerations and complications—informed by an intersectional analysis, and particularly the concept of privilege—that must be taken into account when determining how to assign duties to resist. I argue that failure to recognise these nuances results in an overcautiousness when it comes to assigning duties of resistance, and that a blanket reluctance to assign such duties is of most detriment to the most marginalised.
2026. “Where Ethics and Aesthetics Diverge: Reconsidering the Objection from Creepiness.” British Journal of Aesthetics 66 (1): 55-71.
Abstract: In ‘Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian’s Rape of Europa’ (2003), A.W. Eaton conducts an in-depth analysis of Titian’s Rape of Europa, presenting the painting as an example of a work that is ethically defective and whose ethical defect diminishes the work aesthetically. In this paper, I argue that while Eaton convincingly pinpoints an ethical defect in the work, she fails to show that it is thereby aesthetically defective. My argument revives what she calls the ‘Objection from Creepiness’ (OfC), which appeals to the existence of ‘creeps’, for whom the ethical defect in a work does not block the prescribed response. I argue that Eaton’s dismissal of the objection is too quick, and that a reconsideration of the OfC shows it to be particularly powerful in cases where (1) creeps are the target audience of a work, and (2) the ethical defects of the work concern the erotic.
“Oppression and Bad Circumstantial Moral Luck“
American Philosophical Association, 2026 Eastern Division Meeting. Invited Symposium.
“Who Has Duties to Resist Oppression?”
99th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, SWIP session, University of Glasgow, Summer 2025
Association for Social and Political Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Glasgow, Summer 2025
Understanding Value XII, Sheffield University, Summer 2024
“Where Ethics and Aesthetics Diverge: Reconsidering the Objection from Creepiness”
Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), New York Chapter Colloquium, New York University – Graduate Student Essay Prize, Spring 2024
”Objectification as a Vice”
James Murphy, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting 2025, NYC
A paper on systemic circumstantial moral luck under oppression
A paper on imaginative resistance and inegalitarian pornography