I am an Associate Professor in Civic Thought and the Assistant Director for Research at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society and core faculty in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program at The Ohio State University.
I work at the intersection of political philosophy, normative ethics, and decision/game theory. My research investigates how individual practical rationality relates to social rules and how those rules organize into systems of norms and institutions. I am especially interested in how recent work in moral psychology and experimental economics can inform our understanding of how to improve our institutions of self-governance.
Books
Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Introduction
with the late Jerry Gaus
Princeton University Press, 2021
New Approaches to Social Contract Theory
ed. with Michael Moehler
Oxford University Press, 2024
The Ethics of Capitalism
with Dan Halliday
Oxford University Press, 2020
Companion website
Research
The Open Society
I am completing a book, Contestable Democracy: How Conflict Sustains Political Legitimacy, which argues that democratic legitimacy is sustained by political contestation rather than consensus. The book continues my defense of the dynamic, Open Society against traditional theories of liberalism and its solidaristic alternatives, including populism, nationalism, and communitarianism. Recent work on this project can be found here.
The PPE Experimental Lab
With Eric MacGilvray, Piers Turner, and Sahar Heydari Fard, I direct the PPE Experimental Lab (PPEXL) at Ohio State, supported by a grant from the PPE Research Consortium. The lab uses experimental methods to study questions at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics.
Property Rights and Moral Psychology
With Shaun Nichols, I use behavioral experiments to test philosophical and psychological accounts of property rights. Our most recent work was published in Cognition.
Conventions and Moral Norms
With Erik Kimbrough, I am using experiments to investigate how conventions and moral norms interact. Our first paper on this was published in Philosophical Psychology.
Bad Norms
With Toby Handfield, Lata Gangadharan, the late Klaus Abbink, and Erte Xiao, I study how norms of anti-social punishment and honor codes develop, stabilize, and change. Our first paper on this topic was published in Nature Communications.
Selected Publications
My work has appeared in the following journals, among others. Each links to a representative paper.
Philosophy & Public Affairs (2025)
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2022)
American Journal of Political Science (2018)
Nature Communications (2017)
Cognition (2023)
Philosophical Studies (2014)
The Journal of Politics (2020)
Synthese (2018)
Human Nature (2018)
Biology & Philosophy (2019)
Philosophical Psychology (2025)
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2018)
Social Philosophy & Policy (2019)
The European Journal of Philosophy (2015)
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2014)
The Journal of Moral Philosophy (2015)
Political Studies (2016)
The Adam Smith Review (2015)
Judgment and Decision Making (2021)
A full list of publications is available here.
Previous Positions
From 2018 to 2025, I taught at Chapman University in the Philosophy Department and the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, most recently as the Wang-Fradkin Associate Professor. I also directed the Law & Liberal Arts Minor.
From 2014 to 2018, I was a lecturer (assistant professor with tenure) in philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.