This page tries to organize some of my thoughts on philosophy by topic. It should go without saying that, the older a post is, the more likely it is to contain views—or ways of expressing those views—that I would no longer endorse today. In particular, the undergrad papers from 2008-2009 were written before I had fully rejected theism. But I’m a digital hoarder, so all that old stuff stays here regardless :)

Thinking and reasoning

• In defense of philosophy (2023)
• Already so (2023)
• Against utopianism (2023)
• Comments on John Rawls’s concepts of reflective equilibrium and reasonable pluralism (2019)

Ethics/morality

• A few interesting ideas from Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (2025)
• Review of On What Matters volume 1 (2024)
• What's missing in Sam Harris's account of morality (2024)
• A review of What We Owe to Each Other and a slideshow on the book (2024)
• Against Korsgaard's account of normativity (2023)
• My favorite meta-ethical view: review of The Feeling of Value (2023)
• On Bernard Williams’s integrity-based objections to utilitarianism (2023)
• Utilitarianism and cases involving a certain kind of injustice (2023)
• Are good/bad, right/wrong, and urgency as separable as The Tango of Ethics argues? (2023)
• Thoughts on x-risks after reading The Precipice (2022)
• On the criticisms of Effective Altruism in The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does (2023)
• Against Mill’s defense of capital punishment (2023)
• Responses to David Benatar’s anti-natalist arguments:
  • Yes, you can do things for the sake of future people (2022)
  • There is no asymmetry between absence of pain and absence of pleasure (2021)
  • Against other asymmetries (2022)
• Moral side-constraints in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (2013)
• Love and morality (a comment on Susan Wolf’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters) (2019)
• A comment on Sean Carroll’s treatment of moral relativism in The Big Picture (2019)
• Response to an Argument for Utilitarianism (2009)

Free will

• The meaning of “choice” (2019)
• A comment on Sean Carroll’s treatment of free will in The Big Picture (2019)
• On the value of moral freedom in A Clockwork Orange (2012)
• Handout on Peter van Inwagen’s “The Incompatbility of Free Will and Determinism” (2019)—to aid discussion of this paper

Death

• Why I was underwhelmed by The Myth of Sisyphus (2023)
• Against the pessimistic attitude toward death presented in Midlife (2019)

Personal identity

• Handout on Derek Parfit’s “Personal Identity” (2019)—to aid discussion of this paper
  
• Handout on Marya Schechtman’s “Personhood and Personal Identity” (2019)—to aid discussion of this paper

Decision theory

• Gambling on God and expected value reasoning (2022)

Religion

• Against Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God’s justification of hell (2021)
• Dualism and Human Duplication (2009)
• Theism Without Objective Ethics (2009)
• Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy (2008)

Misc

• Handout on Donald Davidson’s “On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (2019)—to aid discussion of this paper
• Handout on Thomas Nagel’s “Thought and Reality”—to aid discussion of a chapter of this book