Conceptual Engineering and the Politics of Implementation
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3): 670–691. 2022. With Friedemann Bieber. doi:10.1111/papq.12394
Argues that how much control we have over conceptual change is itself something we can control, and while some domains require the institutionalization of the power to enforce conceptual innovations, because there are strong practical pressures to coordinate on a single harmonized technical terminology, there are also liberal and democratic rationales for making conceptual engineering hard to implement by default.
conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, conceptual change, coordination, liberalism, power
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Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice
British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 727–49. 2017. doi:10.1080/09608788.2016.1266462
Examines Nietzsche’s view that the ideal of justice is a contingent political development emerging only when parties of roughly equal power need a system of exchange and requital to avoid mutually assured destruction, meaning the applicability of norms of justice is originally tied to distributions of power. This perspective reframes justice as a human-made solution to the recurring problem of social order. Understanding these origins vindicates justice as an indispensable invention for social life.
genealogy, power, political philosophy, 19th century, justice, Nietzsche
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