Project 01 · Working title
Standing Is Not an Ordering
The partition thesis distinguishes the question of who counts morally from the question of how those admitted are to be ordered against one another. Ontocentric information ethics is used as the maximal test case: even the most inclusive standing criterion cannot, by itself, supply an internal principle of priority. The argument is currently being sharpened against objections from moral-status theorists.
Central philosophical question
Under what conditions can criteria of moral standing generate an internal ordering — and when do they leave the ordering problem structurally unresolved?
Expected output
Journal article (under review, 2026); follow-up paper on standing and ordering in AI moral-status debates.
Project 02 · Working title
The Locus of Answerability
When institutional reasoning is delegated to automated procedures, answerability is not eliminated but silently relocated — and often to a site that cannot in fact bear it. The project identifies that site, gives it a name, and shows why nominal oversight arrangements frequently leave the underlying gap intact.
Central philosophical question
Where in an institution must answerability be borne once parts of its reasoning have been absorbed into automated procedures — and what does it take for that site to remain occupied?
Expected output
Working paper submission (early 2027); companion paper on typologies of answerability failure; input into ClaimBuilder.ai design.
Project 03 · Working title
Second-Order Provenance
First-order provenance tracks where data came from. Second-order provenance tracks where the normative orderings that make those data matter came from — how a threshold, ranking, or category was authored, licensed, and sustained. The project is developing a framework under which institutions can be audited at that second level rather than only at the level of inputs.
Central philosophical question
What would it take for an institution to own not only the data it uses, but the normative orderings under which those data are taken to matter?
Expected output
Journal article; operational audit framework co-developed with ClaimBuilder.ai; workshop paper on institutional recordkeeping as moral infrastructure.
Project 04 · Working title
Creaturehood Under Conditions of Optimization
The project reconstructs creaturehood as an anthropological structure — the sense in which a human life is given rather than assembled — and asks what persists or is deformed when optimisation becomes an ambient environment. It draws together theological anthropology, philosophy of action, and formation theory, without collapsing the philosophical question into a confessional one.
Central philosophical question
Which features of the human subject presuppose that a life is received rather than optimised — and what happens to those features when the environment is engineered to eliminate exactly that assumption?
Expected output
Book chapter (in preparation, 2026–27); series of essays on formation and agency under optimisation.
Project 05 · Working title
Comparative Desire and Social Violence
Platform environments do not merely display inequality — they format it as entitlement whose frustration takes a recognisable, and monetisable, affective shape. The project develops a philosophical account of how comparative entitlements are formed, and of the pathway from platform-mediated comparison, through grievance, to social violence at scale.
Central philosophical question
How does infrastructural comparison generate entitlements whose frustration is structurally converted into grievance — and under what conditions does that conversion scale into social violence?
Expected output
Journal article (working paper, 2026); book-length treatment of post-mimetic relationality as a general social configuration.