I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on the issue of control: How do we exert control over our actions? What are the limits of that control? And what are the ethical and political implications of our limitations, as they intersect with social contexts and new technologies?
I am Lecturer (a.k.a. Assistant Professor) at the University of Southampton’s Department of Philosophy, and Researcher at Externado de Colombia University, where I lead the Self-Control in Context project.
My work currently focuses on two areas:
- Creating tools to design autonomy-supportive artificial intelligence. This involves identifying the ethical boundaries of AI-based influence, building a classification of mental harms, and building tools that developers and designers can use to check whether their AI systems support or hinder human autonomy.
- Understanding the link between self-control and poverty in the Global South. Most work on self-control has studied populations in the Global North. What can we learn from the nature of human agency and rationality by studying the skills and strategies people develop in a broader set of contexts? I develop this work by leading the Templeton-funded project Self-Control in Context.
I am also Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in Technology, TU Hamburg. I have been visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).
I have recently become editor of the wonderful Diversity Reading List for the ‘philosophy of action’ and ‘ethics of technology’ categories. I am also Philpapers editor of the ‘trying’ and ‘habit’ categories.
When I’m not doing philosophy I try to run 5k as fast as I can. I also love bike touring with my wife Ade, hiking up and down mountains and occasionally making music. (In the photo you can see the Neuchâtel lake behind the Jura mountains, which I hiked and biked around while being a postdoc there.)
News and Updates
- September 2024 - Our review paper "Believe in Your Self-Control", on the effects of everyday self-control beliefs, co-written with Sam Murray, is out now in Current Opinion in Psychology's excellent new issue on self-control and self-regulation!
- August 2024 - I joined the University of Southampton as Lecturer in Philosophy!!
- Also March 2024 - Our project “Inequality, goals and time” (PI William Jiménez) was just granted USD $15.000 in funding by the TREES research grant fund (Uniandes & Ford Foundation)!
- Also March 2024 - I will be a lecturer in the Ethics of Influence summer school organised by Michael Klenk at TU Delft!
- March 2024 - I will be co-editing a special issue of Synthese on the philosophy of effort with Malte Hendrickx and Olivier Massin!
- February 2024 - The paper “The whole is larger than the sum of its parts: additive effects of SMS nudge bundles”, coauthored with S. Barbosa, is out now open access at Frontiers in Communication. My first paper doing some real nudging!