I am a philosopher working at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and public policy. More specifically, I think and write about practical rationality and decision theory, ethics, public policy evaluation, economic methodology, and the application of economic methods to philosophical problems. What unites most of my work to date is a desire to better understand what morality and rationality require of us when we don’t know what the future may hold. Recently, I have thought a lot about whether ordinary people and policy-makers faced with uncertainty are required to follow some variant of expected utility theory, what that even means in the first place, what the alternatives may be, and how plausible these are. What’s at stake in this debate, in practical terms, is how much room we can make for genuine risk aversion and precaution in public policy and in our ordinary lives.
Below, you will find my published work as well as work in progress roughly (and imperfectly) grouped by subject area.
Decision Theory and Rationality:
- Preference Cycles and the Requirements of Instrumental Rationality (Work in Progress)
- Judgementalism about Normative Decision Theory (2021) in Synthese 198, pp. 6767–6787.
- No Escape from Allais: Reply to Buchak (2020, with Jonathan Weisberg) in Philosophical Studies 177, pp. 2493–2500.
- Instrumental Rationality Without Separability (2020) in Erkenntnis 85, pp. 1219–1240.
- Risk Aversion and the Long Run (2019) in Ethics 129 (2), pp. 230–253.
- Decision Theory (2019), contribution to The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology, edited by Richard Pettigrew and Jonathan Weisberg, published open access at PhilPapers.
- Temptation and Preference-Based Instrumental Rationality (2018) in José Bermudez (ed.), Self-Control, Decision Theory, and Rationality, Cambridge University Press.
- Risk Writ Large (2017, with Jonathan Weisberg) in Philosophical Studies 174 (9), pp. 2369–2384.
Ethics and Public Policy:
- Taking Risks on Behalf of Another (Work in Progress)
- Weighing the Costs and Benefits of Public Policy: On the Dangers of Single Metric Accounting forthcoming in LSE Public Policy Review.
- Risk Imposition by Artificial Agents: The Moral Proxy Problem forthcoming in Silja Vöneky, Philipp Kellmeyer, Oliver Müller and Wolfram Burgard (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Responsible Artificial Intelligence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Cambridge University Press.
- On the Possibility of an Anti-Paternalist Behavioural Welfare Economics (2021) in Journal of Economic Methodology 28 (4), pp. 350-363.
- Merely Means Paternalist? Prospect Theory and ‘Debiased’ Welfare Analysis (Work in Progress)
- Time for Caution published Online First in Philosophy and Public Affairs
- Bargaining and the Impartiality of the Social Contract (2015) in Philosophical Studies 172 (12), pp. 3335-3355.
Economic Methodology and Philosophy of Science:
- Folk Psychology and the Interpretation of Decision Theory (2021) in Ergo 7.
- In Defence of Revealed Preference Theory (2021) in Economics and Philosophy 37 (2), pp. 163-187.
- On the Hidden Thought Experiments of Economic Theory (2016) in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 46 (2), pp. 129-146.
- The Epistemic Division of Labor Revisited (2015) in Philosophy of Science 82 (3), pp. 454-472. (programmed with Netlogo)
Johanna Thoma 