Research Overview

My research is practically-oriented and interdisciplinary, and addresses contemporary ethical and public policy issues with tools from philosophy, economics, game theory, and biology. I have published on topics including rationing of healthcare resources, ethical issues in the use of reproductive technologies, the ethics of vaccination development and clinical trials, and public health and vaccination policy, as well as more theoretically-oriented work on foundational issues in economics and rational choice.

My current research project (Salient Solutions) deals with threats to normatively appropriate forms attention. The project tries to understand these threats and develop ethically acceptable ways of dealing with them. I connect issues of attention and salience with questions regarding tensions between individual autonomy and the public good, issues of social cooperation and coordination, and issues of democratic rights. Applications concern the ethics of nudging, vaccination compliance, and the regulation of social media, reporting, and advertisement.

Book

Attention Grabbers: Ethical Issues in a Digital World (under contract with Broadview Press)

This book examines the ethical and political questions that arise in relation to attention and new digital technologies. In a digital world shaped by platforms, algorithms, commercial interests, and political actors, what we attend to can influence what we come to want or believe, and ultimately how we act. Is this a problem for us as individuals? For society?

These questions concern how we pay attention and what we pay attention to, but they also have important ethical dimensions. Is it wrong for technology companies to design platforms to capture as much of our attention as possible? Is there something morally problematic about the ways attention is directed online, including towards advertising, hateful content, or politically divisive material? Do we have moral obligations, individually and collectively, to pay attention to some things rather than others?

The book considers the commodification of attention, algorithmic curation, misinformation and polarization, and the ethics of public attention and agenda-setting. It asks how attention may permissibly be shaped by outside actors, and what this means for personal autonomy, democratic engagement, and public life.

Published Academic Articles

The Attention Market -- and what is wrong with it (with Sebastian Watzl).

Philosophical Studies, 183(1), 227-257

Motivation for Participating in Phase 1 Vaccine Trials: Comparison of an Influenza and Ebola Randomized Control Trial (with A. Cattapan, D.M. Halperin, A. Di Castri, P. Fullsack, J. Graham, J.M. Langley, B.A. Taylor, S.A. McNeil, S.A. Halperin)
Vaccine 35.2. (2019): 289-295

Why Should We Team Reason?

Economics and Philosophy 34.2 (2018): 185-198

Voluntary Sterilisation and Access to IVF

Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (2018): 262-265

Ebola Vaccine Trials (with Tangwa, G. B. & D. Schroeder. In Ethics Dumping: Case Studies in North-South Research Collaborations. Springer Publishers, 2018: 49-60.

Reason and Pareto‐Optimization

Southern Journal of Philosophy 55.2 (2017): 196-213

The Measles and Free Riders: California's Mandatory Vaccination Law

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 25, no.3 (July 2016): 472-478

Why Governance? A Challenge to Good Governance of Biobanks

Monash Bioethics Review 33.4 (2015): 295-300.

Two Problems of Cooperation

What Makes Us Moral: On the Capacities and Conditions for Being Moral, eds. Bert Musschenga and Anton Harskamp. Springer Publishers (2013): 31-50.

Morality, Prudential Rationality, and Cheating (with Alister Browne)

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 16.1 (2007): 53-62.

Papers in Progress/Under Review

What is Public Attention? (currently under review)