ABOUT ME
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I am a post-doctoral research fellow in the Political and International Studies Department of the University of Warwick, and member of the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group. My research interests are in epistemology and moral philosophy, with a particular focus on the philosophy of trust, expertise, and technology. I am also interested in aesthetics, particular in questions about the relationship between moral and aesthetic values, and in the application of technology such as AI to art.
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​Since joining Warwick, I have worked on multiple research projects as a post-doctoral research fellow. These include Moral Obligation and Epistemology: The Case of Vaccine Hesitancy; GEMS: Gaming Ecosystem as a Multi-Layered Security Threat; AdSoLve: Addressing Socio-technical Limitations of LLMs for Medical and Social Computing; and ARTificial Intelligence: Show Me Story About AI.​
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The vaccine project explores moral and epistemological concerning vaccine hesitancy, taking the recent COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. GEMS explores research ethics questions pertaining to the use of AI systems to research and combat terrorism and radicalisation in online video-gaming platforms. AdSoLve explores the limitations, ethical and legal implications of using Large Language Models in legal and medical diagnostic settings, and to develop a framework for trustworthy AI use in such cases. ARTificial Intelligence, explores the application of AI to the creative industries, focusing on understanding the perspectives of the creative communities, and answering philosophical questions about the relationship between this emerging technology and aesthetic concepts such as creativity.
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Before coming to Warwick, I completed my thesis - Trust, Audit, and Public Engagement - at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling. This project explored the relationship between audit and public trust in public institutions.
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PUBLICATIONS
Against Moral-Aesthetic Prescriptivism: Rejecting the Foundations of the Moralism Versus Immoralism Debate
Moralists and immoralists debate over whether it is possible for immoral artworks to have their aesthetic value enhanced in virtue of their immorality. Roughly, moralists answer in the negative, immoralists in the affirmative. However, both sides of the debate share a characterization of what it means for an artwork to have moral value. They hold a position I call moral-aesthetic prescriptivism. According to moral-aesthetic prescriptivism, artworks have moral value when they prescribe their audiences to adopt moral or immoral attitudes towards their subject matter. Moral-aesthetic prescriptivists also believe audiences are required to adopt the attitudes prescribed by artworks if they are to engage with artworks appropriately. In this paper, I argue that moral-aesthetic prescriptivism is false. Artworks with moral content do not necessarily prescribe audiences to take moral or immoral attitudes towards their contents, and even if they did, audiences are not required to adopt them. Thus, the basis on which moralists and immoralists have taken artworks to have moral value needs to be rethought.
Violent video games are not always or perhaps even typically used for recruitment by extremist groups, even when extremists produce their own games. Nevertheless, when not used for recruitment, they have a clear propaganda function, including that of “normalising” extremism behind the façade of a familiar first-person shooter format. There is some evidence that success in violent video games may distinguish players and make them liable to in-person approaches from extremists on game-adjacent platforms. These approaches may radicalize players who are looking for social connection, and may, in a few cases, turn them into real-world fighters. Extremist games also give people with extremist inclinations the opportunity to act them out online. The transition from game violence to real violence is not guaranteed, but extremists encourage it, sometimes through tactical communication over gaming devices, sometimes by using game audio and text for the expression of hate. There are strong and obvious moral objections to this use of games and game-adjacent platforms, and to enlisting games for the common extremist objective of weakening liberal democracy.
THESIS
Trust, Audit and Public Engagement
Public auditors such as Audit Scotland aim to provide independent assurance to the public that money is spent effectively, efficiently and that it, and the activities of public organisations, provide public value.
This project has two objectives. Firstly, to develop conceptual models of public audit that support public organisations' trustworthiness as organisations that provide public value. Secondly, to develop conceptual models of public engagement that auditors (and public organisations generally) can use to build public trust in their organisations.
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The project has three parts. Part 1 provides the project's philosophical foundations, defining the core concepts of trust, trustworthiness, distrust, and untrustworthiness that I employ in the thesis. Then I apply those concepts to trust relations between the public and public organisations. You can read a summative report of my findings here.
In part 2, I examine the relationship between audit and the trustworthiness of government. I will defend audit against audit sceptics, who argue that audit undermines public organisations' trustworthiness and public trust in those organisations. I will do this by arguing that whether audit faces these objections is dependent on the model of audit practice that we adopt, and I propose models of audit that avoid the audit sceptics’ objections. You can read a summative report of my findings here.
In part 3, I develop conceptual models of trust-conducive public engagement, and I examine the role that auditors can play in enhancing public trust in public organisations. Firstly, I determine whether the obligation to build trust in public organisations is compatible with audit function. Secondly, I determine what public organisations' communicative obligations are; for instance, do they require public organisations always to be open, honest, and transparent? Finally, I argue that public engagement models that empower the voices of those engaged with are more likely to induce trust between the organisation which empowers and those empowered through such public engagement. You can read a summative report of my findings here.
CONTACT
PAIS, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road
Coventry CV4 7AL
