ABOUT ME
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PUBLICATIONS
In philosophical work on the ethics of video games, ludic amoralists argue that acts players perform in games are beyond moral scrutiny. This is chiefly supported by the following arguments: the fictional harm argument, the consequentialist rebuttal, and the moral exploration argument. The fictional harm argument supports ludic amoralism in principle: if all game actions are fictional, none can be immoral. The consequentialist rebuttal supports a defeasible default: if violent games do not reliably produce harmful outcomes, amoralism is the default position. The moral exploration argument provides an aesthetic reason for amoralism: play is beyond moral criticism insofar as the player engages with the game in an aesthetic, exploratory way. Drawing on Waltonian theories of fiction, I argue that players often imagine themselves as performing the fictional acts represented in games, ranging from heroic exploits to morally abhorrent deeds. When players do this, they can come to identify with, to varying degrees, their fictional exploits. Strong identification occurs when players interpret their fictional actions as satisfying real desires, such as the desire to harm others. Using examples from players of violent extremist games, as well as mainstream violent games, I show how such identification can arise in practice. Most importantly, I show that in cases of strong identification, all three justifications for ludic amoralism fail.
The Reasonableness of COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Hesitancy
COVID-19 vaccine booster hesitancy is a reluctance or unwillingness of unvaccinated and vaccinated people to receive COVID-19 boosters. Many booster-hesitant people were initially willing to comply with the initial COVID-19 vaccine roll out, making their current hesitancy seem especially unreasonable. This chapter concerns the reasonableness of COVID-19 booster hesitancy among the vaccinated. It is argued that some hesitancy within this group is reasonable on three grounds. First, the initial rollout took place in a public emergency, whereas boosters are rolled out in a non-emergency situation. Public emergencies create special overriding considerations that make most vaccine hesitancy unreasonable, but those considerations do not arise in non-emergencies. Second, the justification of annual boosters is precautionary rather than to do with an emergency, and precautionary justification is disputable given that there are reasonable alternative mitigation strategies. Third, the expected contribution in receiving boosters is burdensome for some groups, such as young people, and especially young males.
CONTACT
PAIS, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road
Coventry CV4 7AL
