My Research

Areas of Specialization: Ethics and Applied Ethics, especially Military Ethics, AI Ethics, and Bioethics

Areas of Competence: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Metaphysics

  • A short post based on the above article can be found on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association (link)

Op-eds

Under Review (draft available upon request)

  • “Why Ethicists Probably Know Better: The Case for Moral Expertise” (w/ Mark Boespflug)

  • “A Metanormative Approach to Social Ethics”

Work in Progress

  • “The Social Model: How Voting Among Experts Informs What We Ought to Do” (w/ Mark Boespflug)

  • “The Moral Argument to Opt Out of Facebook, Instagram, and X” (research version)

My Papers

My Work

My research focuses on the ethics of emerging technology, particularly AI. My paper “A Sociotechnological-System Approach to AI Ethics” conceptualizes AI research products as distributed sociotechnological systems with human and artifactual components. The tendency to start theorizing with machines and their intrinsic features—for example, talking of autonomous systems as “self-sufficient, self-reliant, and independent” —stems from a misunderstanding of both autonomy (at least as the notion applies to AI agents) and the human-machine relationship. The sociotechnological-system account, by focusing on the relationships that obtain between humans and AI algorithms, dispels common moral objections to autonomous AI tech, such as the idea that they open up an unacceptable “gap” where no one can be held morally responsible for their behavior. By keeping the connections between humans and machines in focus, the perspective opens the door to novel ideas about how to maintain the safety of, and human control over, increasingly intelligent AI systems.

My research also looks at the ethics of AI-based military technologies, especially the moral debate over autonomous weapons. A survey of the ethical literature provides a host of reasons not to deploy such systems; international campaigns (e.g., The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots), NGOs, and governments are calling for a ban. I disagree with these trends (Riesen, 2022). If we ban autonomous weapons, then we may be giving up on large moral benefits accruing in the future, as such weapons have the potential to massively reduce psychological, moral, and lethal risk on both sides of future conflicts. There is, therefore, a strong positive moral case for continued development, even when weighed against the moral objections to such systems.

I’m also engaged in projects related to the existence of ethical expertise. According to recent surveys, roughly two-thirds of ethicists deny their own expertise. At the same time, preliminary evidence suggests that four out of five ethicists are cognitivists, i.e., they believe in moral facts. If there are moral facts, and if humans can come to know (or have epistemically warranted beliefs about ) them, then how does making their study one’s life occupation not elevate the epistemic status of ethicists moral judgments? The epistemic conditions constitutive of expertise generally apply no less to ethics than to science or the law. The existence of ethical expertise has important ramifications for technology ethics, particularly the AI safety research program known as value alignment. We want AI systems to do what is best, or at least what is permissible, when operating in morally complex domains. Mark Boespflug and I argue that AI behavior ought to be aligned with ideal values. In our paper “Aligning with Ideal Values: A Proposal for Anchoring AI in Moral Expertise” (2025, AI & Ethics), we argue that the best way to approximate the content of ideal values for the purposes of alignment is to aggregate the considered judgments of ethical experts.