Makan Nojoumian

Thesis title: Competing Claims

Biography

Background

I've been a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh since 2020. I work on distributive ethics, population ethics and decision theory. Before coming to Edinburgh, I read philosophy at St Andrews (MLitt) and Cambridge (MPhil).

Undergraduate teaching

I have received training and tutored for a range of pre-honours courses – in ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and the history of philosophy – which entails teaching multiple classes of roughly 15 students and marking midterm and final papers. I have also been tutoring students one-on-one to help with their essays for a larger range of courses (through the School’s Skills Centre). In 2023, I co-organised and gave lectures for an honours level course on the Philosophy of Economics with Barry Maguire.

Research summary

My doctoral dissertation consists of five self-standing but inter-related papers on distributive ethics, population ethics and decision theory. Over the course of these papers, I develop a new formal framework for comparing distributions of well-being by assessing the competing claims of individuals, and extend it to cover both decisions under conditions of uncertainty and populations with varying sizes. I then argue for a ‘prioritarian’ view that gives priority to the claims of the worse off and, what is more, places a strict limit on the value of benefits. I also develop the parallels with decision theory and argue for a risk-averse approach to individual decision-making. Alongside my thesis, I have also been collaborating with fellow PhD student Kristoffer Moody on instrumentalist accounts of reactive attitudes in light of research in social psychology.

Review of M. A. Roberts, The Existence Puzzle: An Introduction to Population Axiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 280, with Hyde B.V.E, Ball H. Utilitas. Published online 2025:1-4. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820824000232

Blame: what is it good for?, with Kristoffer Moody. Philosophical Explorations. Published online 2024: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2024.2405523

Partial aggregation for prioritarians. Utilitas 36.3 (2024): 230-241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0953820824000074

Review of Alastair Norcross, Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Pp. Vii + 157. Utilitas 36.2 (2024): 186–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0953820823000316

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