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.

Publications

• A Fixed-Population Problem for the Person-Affecting Restriction. Philosophical Studies, forthcoming.
• Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought. Mind, 128(510), April 2019: 459-484.
• Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows. The Philosophical Review, 128(1), January 2019: 63-105.
• An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox. Ethics, 129(2), January 2019: 309-343.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than. Noûs, 52(4), December 2018: 874-899.
• Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People. Ethics, 127(4), July 2017: 896-911.
• Status Quo Bias, Rationality, and Conservatism about Value. Ethics 125(2), January 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.

Some Working Papers

• "Totalism without Repugnance" explores the view that a sufficiently large population of excellent lives would contain more total well-being than any population of mediocre lives. Forthcoming in a festschrift for Derek Parfit, edited by Tim Campbell, Jeff McMahan, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.
• "Asymmetries in the Value of Existence" explores the view that a miserable life is worse for a person than nonexistence, which isn't worse for a person than having a happy life.
• "Calibration Dilemmas in the Ethics of Distribution" (with H. Orri Stefánsson) shows that, according to leading theories of distributive ethics, intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequality-increasing tradeoffs entails intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes tradeoffs.
• "Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance" shows that risk-weighted expected utility maximizers behind the veil of ignorance would choose prospects that are worse for everyone and prospects that guarantee worse distributions.