I am a political and moral philosopher completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford. My research is driven by problems at the intersection of distributive and social justice, applied ethics, and social epistemology.
My doctoral work has focused on the normative dimensions of informal social practices: what makes nepotism and other forms of partiality wrong, how individual duties of justice can be grounded and secured without inappropriate coercion, and what the ethics of selection and discrimination reveal about the conditions under which agents can genuinely author their own lives. Research undertaken during this period, What Makes Nepotism Wrong?, has generated two peer-reviewed publications in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy and the European Journal of Political Theory, alongside ongoing work on generative AI, emotional-authorial outsourcing, and the ethics of self-deception.
My current and developing research extends these concerns across three interconnected directions. The first examines when informal norm cultivation and social pressure can serve as legitimate vehicles for individual duties of justice, and what distinguishes such pressure from objectionable coercion. The second investigates selective solidarity — the systematic tendency for solidaristic mobilisation to track ideological alignment and reputational incentives rather than the impartial urgency of the relevant cause — and its implications for hermeneutical injustice. The third asks whether the contemporary philosophical and cultural turn towards self-improvement reflects genuine self-authorship or an ideologically conditioned displacement of political agency inward, particularly under conditions of structural constraint and perceived limits on collective efficacy.
Together these projects constitute a developing research programme on the ethics of social change under non-ideal conditions: how informal norms, collective pressure, and practices of solidarity and self-improvement shape individual moral agency, and how agents can pursue justice when coercive enforcement is unavailable or inappropriate.