Jake Nebel

I am an assistant professor of philosophy at USC. I received my PhD from NYU in 2019, BPhil from Oxford in 2015, and 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; the formal structure of 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 jnebel@usc.edu. Here is my CV.

Drafts

• Calibration Dilemmas in the Ethics of Distribution (with H. Orri Stefánsson).
• The Case for Comparability (with Cian Dorr and Jake Zuehl).

Publications

• Conservatisms about the Valuable. Forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
• Utils and Shmutils. Forthcoming in Ethics.
• Totalism Without Repugnance. Forthcoming in Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit, edited by Jeff McMahan, Tim Campbell, James Goodrich, and Ketan Ramakrishnan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance. Ethics, 131(1), 2020: 87--106.
• A Fixed-Population Problem for the Person-Affecting Restriction. Philosophical Studies, 177(9), 2020: 2779-2787.
• Asymmetries in the Value of Existence. Philosophical Perspectives, 33(1), 2019: 126-145.
• An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox. Ethics, 129(2), 2019: 309-343.
• Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows. The Philosophical Review, 128(1), 2019: 63-105.
• Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought. Mind, 128(510), 2019: 459-484.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than. Noûs, 52(4), 2018: 874-899.
• Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People. Ethics, 127(4), 2017: 896-911.
• Status Quo Bias, Rationality, and Conservatism about Value. Ethics 125(2), 2015: 449-76.
• Teaching Philosophy through Lincoln-Douglas Debate, with Peter van Elswyk, Ben Holguín, and Ryan Davis. Teaching Philosophy 36(3), 2013: 271-89.
• A Counterexample to Parfit's Rule Consequentialism. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 6(2), 2012: 1-10.