My academic research in political philosophy and ethics focuses on contemporary moral problems, including the ethics of emerging technology and how to repair deep divisions in our political system. I also collaborate with a wide variety of partners beyond the academy, from public impact projects to policy teams, seeking practical progress on complex ethical issues.

Political Philosophy & Political Epistemology

In political philosophy, my research investigates ways to develop mutual respect and understanding across the deep moral and political disagreements that characterize contemporary society. The challenge is to secure fair terms of political cooperation that respect our fellow citizens, however different their beliefs may be. Current solutions tend to follow Rawls’s lead in Political Liberalism by focusing on reasons publicly available to all. Yet public reason has proved controversial, and most defensible as a narrow solution internal to ideal liberal theory. This diminishes its usefulness for navigating the conflicts prevalent in contemporary society. I propose an alternative approach that reconceives reasonableness as a moral threshold of recognition respect, bifurcated from Rawlsian standards of legitimacy. I extend my defense of the moral threshold of reasonableness to show how it can help secure equality and freedom for marginalized populations. The result should be a robust standard for respecting our fellow citizens despite deep disagreements, while securing political protection for disempowered groups. My research in this area has appeared in The Journal of Political Philosophy and Law and Philosophy, and it guided Ethics Lab’s collaborations with the Smithsonian Institute’s Women’s Initiative and the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

In the emerging field of political epistemology, I have extended my work on political liberalism to (1) the epistemology of disagreement and (2) the impact of digital media and group polarization on public reason. A new volume that I edited, Political Epistemology was just published by Oxford University Press. I also serve on the steering committee of the Political Epistemology Network and organize the group’s sessions at the APA.

Ethics of Emerging Technology

In the ethics of emerging technology, my research aims to bring philosophical insights to practitioners outside of philosophy, both through publications in journals followed by technologists, for example IEEE and New Media & Society, as well as through my direct engagements with research and policy teams seeking to build ethics into their technical work. My research has driven Ethics Lab’s partnerships and grants in ethics of technology, and beyond my work at Ethics Lab, I also seek to build interdisciplinary research projects to investigate emerging technology. I have collaborated closely with lawyers, computer scientists, and science and technology studies scholars to investigate questions of privacy, consent, and individual rights. I had a two-year grant investigating consent in the digital age.

Currently, I am participating in a new research project exploring data cooperatives as a way to better protect individuals’ rights in the new data economy to shift the balance of power back to individuals. 

Impact Projects & Collaborations

I served as Senior Ethicist at Georgetown’s Ethics Lab, where I was responsible for developing translational ethics methodologies to empower students and experts to address the urgent issues of our time. These methods seek to bring ethics into complex contemporary issues in ways that facilitate productive interdisciplinary collaborations.

I was responsible for leading Ethics Lab’s grant projects in collaboration with policy and research teams. In the fall of 2019, funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation, I designed and led a convening of an interdisciplinary group of experts in ethics, technology, law, and policy to examine ethical issues that arise in sharing administrative data across public and private sectors. The resulting white paper can be found here.

I also developed a workshop series on “Ethics in AI for Future Policymakers,” funded by a grant from the Public Interest Technology University Network. This series seeks to help a cohort of technology policy fellows from Tech Congress, AAAS, and Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology work with the rapidly evolving ethical challenges they confront in advising on AI policy during their placements in various governmental agencies and Congress.

Previously, I led Ethics Lab’s partnerships with the Inter-American Development’s Fair Artificial Intelligence Project, Harvard’s Privacy Tools Project, and the Smithsonian Institutes.