Publications

• 2025
  
  “Conventionalism and the Wrong of Promise-Breaking,” in Engaging Raz: Themes in Normative Philosophy, eds. Kimberley Brownlee, David Enoch, and Andrei Marmor, Oxford University Press. [Published Version][Penultimate Draft]

Work in progress

Below are some of the papers I am currently working on. If you are interested, please email me for drafts.

• A paper on authority and paternalism [Draft]
  Accepted pending minor revisions at Free & Equal
  Winner of the Jacobsen Essay Prize

  Abstract. Instrumentalist accounts of authority justify authority on the basis of some good, benefit or service that authority relations provide for those subject to such relations. These accounts of authority are often criticised for justifying too much authority, and in particular, for justifying forms of authority which appear paternalistic: some authority relations do not seem justified even though they are, or would be, clearly beneficial to those subject to them. In this paper, I defend instrumentalist accounts of authority against this objection. I begin by arguing that, contrary to the suggestions made by several others, instrumentalist justifications of authority would not be more plausible if restricted in scope to cases involving pre-existing obligations, or some particularly weighty subset of moral or “categorical” concerns. I suggest, instead, that any worries about paternalism can be accommodated by instrumentalist accounts of authority in other ways.

• A paper on authority and normative power

  Abstract. Any adequate account of authority should be able to explain: (i) what distinguishes authoritative directives from other forms of social control and influence, such as giving advice and issuing threats, (ii) how authoritative directives give rise to reasons to do what has been directed, which are both pre-emptive and at least partly independent of the content of those directives, and (iii) how it is possible for authorities to alter other people’s normative situation simply by telling others what to do. In much recent literature on authority, the idea practical authority amounts to, or involves, the exercise of a “normative power” has been advanced as a potential answer to all three of these questions. This, I think, is a mistake. To show this, I defend an account of the nature and justification of authoritative commands which answers the three questions just outlined, without relying on the idea that authority amounts to a “normative power,” on any of the most common understandings of that term. Along the way, my argument demonstrates the several ways in which thinking of authority as a “normative power” is liable to mislead.

• A paper on political authority

  Abstract. The capacity to impose binding directives on others is central to practical authority. However, we typically associate legitimate authorities with a range of further rights, over and above the capacity to issue binding directives. In a political context, these rights include a right to enforcement and a right to non-interference. This bundle of rights, further, are essential to our understanding of political authority, not least because political authority is, at its very essence, coercive. Since legitimate political authority comprises a bundle of rights on the part of rulers, a full justification of political authority also requires a justification of such a bundle of rights. In this paper, I offer such a justification, inspired by Elizabeth Anscombe’s “task-based” account of political authority.

At UCL, I have been a Post-Graduate Teaching Assistant on the following undergraduate courses:

I sometimes write for news outlets and magazines, mostly in my native Sweden. My writing has appeared in numerous Swedish newspapers and magazines (including Aftonbladet, ETC, Flamman, Arbetet, and Liberal Debatt), as well as the US-based Jacobin magazine.

I'm working on collecting links to these pieces, which may appear here soon.