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 measurement and aggregation of well-being and other values; and the creation and preservation of value. I have also written about reasons and rationality, propositional attitude reports, and the logic of comparatives.

You can email me at jnebel@usc.edu. Here is my CV.

Working Papers

• Ethics Without Numbers.

Publications

• The Case for Comparability (with Cian Dorr and Jake Zuehl). Noûs, forthcoming.
• Calibration Dilemmas in the Ethics of Distribution (with H. Orri Stefánsson). Economics and Philosophy, forthcoming.
• Totalism Without Repugnance. In Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit, ed. Jeff McMahan, Tim Campbell, James Goodrich, and Ketan Ramakrishnan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022): 200-231.
• Consequences of Comparability (with Cian Dorr and Jake Zuehl). Philosophical Perspectives 35 (2021): 70-98.
• Aggregation Without Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, published online 2021.
• Utils and Shmutils. Ethics 131 (2021): 571-599.
• Conservatisms about the Valuable. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, published online 2021.
• Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance. Ethics 131 (2020): 87-106.
• A Fixed-Population Problem for the Person-Affecting Restriction. Philosophical Studies 177 (2020): 2779-2787.
• Asymmetries in the Value of Existence. Philosophical Perspectives 33 (2019): 126-145.
• An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox. Ethics 129 (2019): 309-343.
• Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows. The Philosophical Review 128 (2019): 63-105.
• Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought. Mind 128 (2019): 459-484.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than. Noûs 52 (2018): 874-899.
• Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People. Ethics 127 (2017): 896-911.
• Status Quo Bias, Rationality, and Conservatism about Value. Ethics 125 (2015): 449-76.
• Teaching Philosophy through Lincoln-Douglas Debate, with Peter van Elswyk, Ben Holguín, and Ryan Davis. Teaching Philosophy 36 (2013): 271-89.
• A Counterexample to Parfit's Rule Consequentialism. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 6 (2012): 1-11.