I’m currently researching topics in political philosophy, epistemology, and AI Ethics – especially ones that require thinking about a couple or all these fields. One of my main projects is to understand why the concept of legitimacy can and should apply to online platforms like Facebook and Amazon. Another is to understand how a widely accepted requirement for legitimacy called public justification can be compatible with our pervasive dependence on testimony to form our political beliefs. I also have work on various side projects about collective memory, AI, epistocracy, and democratic theory.

 

Legitimacy is an institution’s right to function without significant interference from the general public. When is a state legitimate? is the first question of political philosophy, since an illegitimate state doesn’t deserve the public’s acceptance. We should expect the question When is a platform legitimate? to have similar importance for one of the most dominant structures of our online lives. In my view, the biggest threat to platform legitimacy comes from their potential to violate rights and their tendency to expect their users to adhere to rules they don’t follow themselves. I’m currently thinking about how platforms are involved with such rights violations and inconsistent behaviour, particularly when it comes to how they govern virtual communities.

 

Public justification is the idea that authoritative political and social action is legitimate only when it is justifiable to everyone. I argue that our pervasive dependence on testimony to form our political beliefs requires us to consider whether an action is publicly justified to partly depend on what's called epistemically externalist conditions. In other words, whether an act of political or social authority is publicly justified partly depends on conditions we can't always recognise from our perspectives as having been satisfied.

 

Externalizing public justification has significant implications for our understanding of political misinformation, civic virtue, and social morality. For instance, deceptive testimony undermines the externalist conditions for public justification and so prevents the public from enjoying an ideal of democratic discourse. This gives us important moral reason to consider disinformation objectionable in addition to whatever bad practical consequences it might have. Furthermore, almost all testimony involves simplification, which makes misinformation likely even without deceptive intent. Whether the external conditions of public justification are preserved in such cases depends on the civic virtue of testifiers, such as whether they offered their testimony in a trustworthy manner.

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This is all just to preview my main projects. For more information about my side projects, feel free to check out my publication page.