Publications
1. Gil Hersch and Thomas Rowe, forthcoming, "Lotteries, Queues, and Bottlenecks", Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 10. [pdf]
2. Thomas Rowe and David Papineau, 2022, "Everett, Lotteries and Fairness", Thought. [pdf]
3. Thomas Rowe, 2021, "Can a Risk of Harm itself be a Harm?", Analysis, Vol. 81, pp. 694-701. [pdf]
Subject of a response by H. Orri Stefánsson, forthcoming, "How a pure risk of harm can itself be a harm: a reply to Rowe", Analysis. [Link]
4. Simon Beard, Thomas Rowe, and James Fox, 2020, "An Analysis and Evaluation of Methods Currently Used to Quantify the Likelihood of Existential Hazards", Futures, Vol. 115, pp. 1-14. [pdf]
Subject of a response by Seth Baum, 2020, "Quantifying the Probability of Existential Catastrophe: A Reply to Beard et. al", Futures, Vol. 123, pp. 1-8. [Link]
5. Thomas Rowe, 2019, "Risk and the Unfairness of Some Being Better Off at the Expense of Others", Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-23. [pdf]
6. Thomas Rowe and Alex Voorhoeve, 2018, "Egalitarianism under Severe Uncertainty",
Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 46, Issue 3, pp. 239-268. [pdf]
Subject of a response by Akira Inoue and Kaname Miyagishima, 2022, "A Defense of Pluralist Egalitarianism under Severe Uncertainty: Axiomatic Characterization", The Journal of Political Philosophy. [Link]
Subject of a PEA Soup discussion, with a critical introduction by Brian Jabarian, May 2019 [Link]
Google Scholar profile here.
Under Review (Titles have been modified for peer review)
"Fairness and Weighted Lotteries"
In this paper I argue that fairness requires the use of a weighted lottery in cases where individuals have unequal claims to a good. In doing do, I defend the importance of what I call the "principle of continuity" -- that a change in claim of some size x ought to warrant a similarly-sized change to what fairness requires. I argue that competing views fail to respect this principle.
Draft available upon request.
"Competition and Scarcity"
In this paper I critique a recent account of two concepts of competition: friction and parallel competition. I argue that the account misses an important feature of the logical form of competition, namely that it ought to be understood on the background of (expected) scarcity. In response, I provide an alternative account I dub the "fate-relation" account, which builds an account of competition on a novel distinction between two species of scarcity: "flexible" and "fixed" scarcity.
Draft available upon request.
In Progress
"What's Wrong with Imposing Risk?"
On what grounds are wrongful impositions of risk wrong? I argue that various strategies fail to ground the wrongfulness of risk itself. This is because they do not demonstrate how the probability of harm could be wrongful apart from culpable conduct. I show how this raises issues for a deontology of risk.
"Allocative Fairness" (with Gil Hersch), commissioned by Philosophy Compass
In this survey article we discuss the current state of play in the literature on allocative fairness, including debates over the nature of goods and claims, the fairness of lotteries, queues and other allocative mechanisms.
"Intervening Agency and Enabling Evil"
In this paper I examine cases where an individual's good action enables an evildoer to commit wrongdoing. I consider the extent to which the intervening agency of the wrongdoer affects the permissibility of the actions of those who aim at good. I argue that the presence of intervening in such cases counts against an action because it leads to a wrongful redirection of a good act.
Draft available upon request.
"Ethics of Risk-Imposing Artificial Agents"
In this paper I consider the prospects for an ethics of risk imposition for artificial agents such as autonomous vehicles. Much work on the ethics of risk imposition is “moralised”, in that it assumes that risk-imposers have some kind of moral agency. I demonstrate how existing approaches to the ethics of risk imposition are not sufficiently compatible with existing models of artificial agents and canvas the prospects of a framework for the ethics of risk imposition.
Other
"Other-Regarding Preferences under Ambiguity" (with Adam Dominiak, Michael Moehler and Sudipta Sarangi)
In this paper we build off a 287-subject experiment that we conducted at Virginia Tech. We examine how individuals make ethical decisions under conditions of risk and ambiguity (where precise probabilities cannot be assigned to an event), and assess the extent to which subjects actions reflect different levels of risk and ambiguity as more or less fair.