Jake Nebel

A picture of Jake

I am a PhD candidate in philosophy at New York University. Starting fall 2019, I will be an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. Before coming to NYU, I received a BPhil from Oxford in 2015 and an AB from Princeton in 2013.

I work mostly on questions in normative ethics and the theory of value. My interests in those areas include the ethics of population, distribution, and risk; incommensurable and vague value relations; the normative significance of various cognitive biases and violations of expected utility theory; and the nature, content, and importance of well-being. I am also interested in reasons, propositions, and questions.

You can email me at jakenebel@nyu.edu.

Papers

  1. An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox. Manuscript.
  2. Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows. The Philosophical Review, forthcoming.
  3. Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought. Mind, forthcoming.
  4. The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than. Noûs, forthcoming (Early View 2017): doi:10.1111/nous.12198
  5. Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People. Ethics, 127(4), July 2017: 896-911.
  6. Status Quo Bias, Rationality, and Conservatism about Value. Ethics 125(2), January 2015: 449-76.
  7. A Counterexample to Parfit's Rule Consequentialism. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 6(2), 2012: 1-10.

Miscellaneous

Competitive debate got me interested in philosophy when I was in high school. I now run Victory Briefs: we publish debate handbooks and direct summer workshops in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. I have written about teaching philosophy through Lincoln-Douglas debate (Teaching Philosophy 36(3), 2013: 271-89) with Peter van Elswyk, Ben Holguin, and Ryan Davis.

I am a member of Giving What We Can.