This article offers critique of Pascoe and Stripling’s The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, which frames environmental disasters as a site of ethical and epistemic openness that enable social transformation. Although sympathetic to their justice-oriented framework, I argue that it implicitly relies on the continued epistemic labor of the most structurally marginalized. Drawing centrally on the work of Maria Lugones and Sara Ahmed, I argue that there is potentially catastrophic loses in the wake of environmental crisis that justify refusing epistemic solidarity with more privileged members of society. I contend that the ambiguity about refusal highlights a potential for Pascoe and Stripling’s framework to unintentionally be epistemically exploitative.

I argue that Waheed Hussain’s critique of advanced market economies would be strengthened if, rather than emphasizing how markets draw us into particular patterns of activity in a “judgment-bypassing” way, through changes in prices and wages, he focused more on an idea that he explores in the first two chapters of Living with the Invisible Hand: the need to justify the specific institutional powers that an advanced market economy creates. I examine how this suggestion relates to two of Hussain’s central claims: that markets are mechanisms of decentralized social governance, and that they pose a distinct threat to our freedom.

I argue that attempts to integrate marginalized epistemic standpoints into dominant frameworks risk treating them as resources for mainstream appropriation. Using a queer activist slogan from the AIDS crisis as a representative example, I warn that because knowledge forged in resistance is often oppositional and always situated, incorporating it into dominant frameworks can dilute its meaning or harm its creators. This points to a deeper tension within standpoint theory: emancipatory projects that seek to engage marginalized imaginaries can reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to dismantle when they fail to recognize these standpoints’ own priorities, limits, and forms of gatekeeping.

Waheed Hussain’s Living with the Invisible Hand argues that, although the market economy is valuable for efficiently coordinating production and consumption, it is morally problematic because it draws us into patterns of activity that bypass our own judgment as rational beings. This makes the market potentially “authoritarian.” But what exactly does it mean to say that the market “bypasses our judgment”? In this article, I seek to clarify this idea and suggest that Hussain has actually identified a few separable senses in which it might be true. These different senses are important to distinguish because they call for different remedies.

In The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change (2024)—an energetic dovetail of disaster sociology and feminist epistemology—Pascoe and Stirling claim there is no such thing as a natural disaster, as all disasters are the product/result of human construction. They use Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival” to anchor their project and focus on Lorde’s understanding of the relationship between poetry, knowledge, and survival to critique dominant the disaster imaginaries. I suggest that a more accurate use of “A Litany for Survival” leans toward a phenomenological epistemology of surviving, rather than a focus on the survivor.

This response addresses critical engagements with The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, defending and expanding its core argument: that disasters generate epistemic opportunities capable of reshaping societies, for better or worse. Drawing from feminist and standpoint epistemologies, the authors develop a heuristic of the epistemic watershed to map how positionality, rupture, and solidarity produce or inhibit liberatory change. They confront critiques of epistemic uptake, emphasizing the ethical costs of appropriating marginalized knowledge while asserting its centrality to just disaster response. Case studies from the Altadena wildfires and post-Maria Puerto Rico illustrate how queer and Black feminist practices of survival, refusal, and community-building challenge dominant imaginaries and enable democratic transformation. Acknowledging the real harms of epistemic extraction and backlash, the authors argue for coalitional knowledge practices as essential in moments of crisis. Ultimately, they insist that disaster must be reimagined not as a neutral rupture but as a battleground for justice-oriented futures.

A critique of capitalism, in order to count as such, must identify a problem that is not shared by all other feasible economic systems, for this would amount to little more than a complaint (or kvetch) about the human condition. The distinction between critique and kvetch raises the question of what constitutes a feasible alternative to capitalism. Although it sounds as though this is a pragmatic or technical question, I will argue that it is usually normative. With this clarification in place, I will consider whether Waheed Hussain’s concerns about capitalism amount to a critique or a kvetch.

Many philosophers have recently defended the Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) approach to moral uncertainty. Perhaps the most important problem for MEC is the problem of intertheoretic choiceworthiness unit comparisons; and one extant response to this problem is a technique called “variance normalization.” Although there has been some short, scattered commentary on variance normalization in the philosophical literature, nobody has yet offered a detailed critical discussion of this proposal. This article fills that lacuna, arguing that there are serious problems that would need to be addressed before variance normalization could be invoked to rescue MEC from skepticism about intertheoretic comparisons.

What economic system does a Kantian ideal of freedom entail? In Living with the Invisible Hand, Waheed Hussain argues it entails intermediated capitalism. Here, I investigate these arguments within the framework of a Kantian theory of right. I sketch a Kantian theory of equal democratic government where we have the right to make together through equal democratic processes decisions that structure our rightful relationships with one another. I argue that any plausible Kantian view of the natural determinacy of property rights justifies extensive government intervention in the economy, creating space to argue for alternative economic systems such as intermediated capitalism.

This paper examines the morality of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Kantian ethics. I argue that it is much harder than is often acknowledged to rule MAID out, even given Kant’s prohibition on suicide. Kant’s non-consequentialism entails that providing MAID does not aid the patient’s duty violation. Moreover, Kant’s distinction between public and private reason provides resources for arguing that those who provide MAID are not complicit with that violation either, at least in jurisdictions in which there is a public mandate. On my reading, the ethical permissibility of providing MAID is largely determined by its legal status.

Physicalism is often characterized by the slogan that “There is nothing over and above the physical.” Thus, making physicalism precise requires making “the physical” precise. In this paper I advance one such way of making the physical precise and in doing so defend a new approach to defining the physical. I argue that a property is physical iff it belongs to the largest strong-component of a causal network that includes exemplary physical properties. This avoids the triviality-problem faced by physics-based accounts and withstands an important argument against accounts that are not physics-based.

Arguments challenging the existence of free will frequently share a common structure, relying on variants of a principle we call Closure, according to which having no choice about a truth is preserved under entailment. We show that, under plausible assumptions, Closure is valid if and only if the ‘no choice’ operator is intensional. By framing the debate in terms of the intensionality of this operator, this paper illuminates previously underappreciated constraints on defenses of Closure-based arguments against the existence of free will.

I offer a novel dispositional reply to Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. Drawing on recent work in the metaphysics of dispositions, I argue that manipulated agents’ rational abilities are masked—prevented from manifesting as they otherwise would—by neuroscientists’ manipulation. I argue that masking better explains why manipulated agents are not responsible for their actions than causal determinism does, as we ordinarily take masks to explain why agents are not morally responsible for their actions or inaction. Because causal determinism is not a mask, there is a relevant difference between manipulation and causal determinism, and the four-case argument fails.

Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument claims that Mary—a neuroscientist who knows all the physical facts about color perception but has never seen color—learns something new when she sees red, posing a challenge to physicalism. While physicalists deny that Mary acquires knowledge of new facts, they must still explain her apparent epistemic progress. I argue that the intuition that Mary gains new knowledge upon seeing red stems from the alleged opacity of propositional attitude ascriptions—the same phenomenon underlying Frege puzzles.