I'm a philosopher working mainly in philosophy of action and ethics, especially in business ethics and AI ethics. I have further interests in political philosophy, early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of mind.
During the 2023-24 academic year I will hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as part of the "Liberalism Rekindled" research project led by Prof. David Enoch. My work in this capacity focuses on the nature of consent in non-ideal settings, and how imperfect consent may still be valid (i.e., how it can still retain its morally transformative powers).
Prior to this, I was a Bloom Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Haifa. There, I workedon how AI challenges our common notions of informed consent. I also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University. There, my work focused on arguing that fairness - understood as one's having a reasonable expectation to benefit substantially from participating in the market - is a normative ideal underlying and justifying competitive markets in relational egalitarian societies.
I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, where I wrote a dissertation on what it means for an action to be unthinkable for someone, and how such unthinkability is constitutive of one's self-identity. I received my BA in PEP (Philosophy, Economics, Political Science) and MA in Philosophy, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Research
Forthcoming: Topoi
This paper develops Bernard Williams's claim that moral incapacity – i.e., one’s inability to consider an action as one that could be performed intentionally – ‘is proof against reward’. It argues that we should re-construe the notion of moral incapacity in terms of self-identification with a project, commitment, value, etc. in a way that renders this project constitutive of one’s self-identity. This consists in one’s being insensitive to incentives to reconsider or get oneself to change one’s identification with this project. More precisely, self-identification with a project implies that no state-given reason can justify for oneself reconsidering, or getting oneself to revise, or abandon one’s identification with that project. This view ties together integrity and self-identification, and avoids problems common to competing views: it avoids regress problems faced by hierarchical theories of identification; it demonstrates that integrationist views of identification overlook the fact that a deep, well-integrated attitude may fail to be incentive-insensitive; and it helps explain what’s wrong with ‘perverse’ cases, where one values acting in a way that one does not all things consider value. It also improves on Williams's own view, by construing moral incapacity not merely in terms of one’s incapacity to perform an action (that undermines one’s project and thus violates one’s integrity), but also in terms of one’s incapacity to reconsider one’s commitment (to said project).
2022, Journal of Business Ethics 179(3) 649-663.
In recent years, insurance companies have begun tracking their customers’ behaviors and price premiums accordingly. Based on the Market-Failures Approach as well as the Justice-Failures Approach, I provide an ethical analysis of the use of tracking technologies in the insurance industry. I focus on the use of telematics in car insurance, and on the use of fitness tracking in life insurance. The use of tracking has some important benefits to policyholders and insurers alike: it reduces moral hazard and fraud, increases actuarial fairness, and incentivizes safe behavior. These benefits,however, are outweighed by significant moral objections. First, the use of tracking technologies significantly undermines the fairness of the interaction between insurance companies and policyholders. Specifically, the use of tracking eliminates information asymmetries, but in such a way that favors insurers exclusively. Furthermore, tracked behaviors and the ability to choose to behave safely are highly correlated with other variables such as income. Therefore, tracking based insurance relies on and exacerbates existing inequalities and injustices, which undermines the benefits that tracking is supposed to introduce.
2020, Business Ethics Quarterly 30(1) 97-117.
In the future, firms may be able to use big-data analysis to discover and offer consumers their individual reservation price (i.e. the highest price each consumer would be willing to pay, given their preferences and available income). I offer an improvement to the market-failures approach and argue that big-data personalized pricing is wrong because it unfairly undermines consumers’ ability to benefit from the market, which is the very point of having a market.
2017, Business Ethics Journal Review 5(5) 28-34.
According to the Market-Failures approach, ethical behavior on the part of management consists in abstaining from profit-maximizing strategies which, under conditions of perfect competition, would decrease Pareto-efficiency. However, since (1) such conditions do not obtain; and (2) the most efficient result – under imperfect conditions – is not achieved by satisfying the largest possible set of the remaining conditions; it is (3) impossible to draw any substantive ethical guidelines from this approach.
Teaching
A few words on my approach to teaching
Teaching Experience (as course instructor)
click underlined year for syllabi
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Ethics and Political Philosophy, 2023
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Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science (for non-philosophers), 2015, '16
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Business Ethics (for business students), 2015
Sapir College
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Science, Religion, and Society (intro), 2022
University of Toronto
How to say my name
The spelling of my name has misled many ​in their attempts to pronounce it.
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For your convenience, here's a quick guide for pronouncing my name:
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​Begin with the word email
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Substitute 'tie' for 'mail' (you now have e-tie)
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Emphasize the 'tie' instead of the 'e' (e-TIE)
And there you go!