Makan Nojoumian

Thesis title: Prioritarianism 2.0

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

Suppose we had to choose between helping one or the other of two patients with severe health conditions, but could not help both. Is it overall better to significantly improve the well-being of the patient with a severe condition, or to moderately improve the well-being of the patient with a very severe condition instead? One intuitive and popular approach to the problem above in the philosophical literature is to think in terms of the ‘competing claims’ of the two patients and ask: whose claim on our aid is stronger? Does the patient with a severe condition have a stronger claim because they will receive a significant improvement in well-being? Or does the patient with the very severe condition have a stronger claim because they are worse off and have a lower well-being level?

I work on developing the right underlying theory for adjudicating this and similar dilemmas, and in particular, developing and justifying a theory that gives priority to the claims of the worse off (i.e. ‘prioritarianism’). My research is also on how such theories can be made to accurately characterise real-world moral dilemmas, especially in public policy, and applied so as to guide our responses.

During my doctoral research, I wrote six self-standing but inter-related papers in which I develop a new formal framework for comparing distributions of well-being by assessing the competing claims of individuals, extend it to cover both decisions under conditions of uncertainty and future people, articulate a critical level of well-being and a principled limit on the value of benefits to avoid aggregating disproportionate claims, and offer novel arguments for prioritarianism. I also develop the framework to expose parallels with decision theory and argue for a complementing risk-averse approach to individual decision-making. Building on and expanding existing research, I call this theory Prioritarianism 2.0.

I have also been collaborating with Kristoffer Moody at the Department of Philosophy on instrumentalist accounts of blame in light of research in social psychology. Our first paper on the topic was recently published in Philosophical Explorations.

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

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

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

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

This article was published on