about.
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. My research interests span moral, legal and political philosophy, focussing on issues surrounding blame and punishment.
My dissertation focusses on the standing to blame, where I pursue two central questions. First, does ‘standing’ pick out a distinct and unified normative property for the ethics of blame? I argue, contra the skeptics, that it does — though existing accounts fail to capture what this property is. Second, can conclusions about interpersonal standing to blame be extended to a state’s standing to punish? Here I am skeptical, resisting the popular claim that a state’s hypocrisy and complicity with respect to the crimes committed by marginalized offenders undermines its standing to punish them.
Beyond my dissertation research, I pursue questions concerning the justification of punishment, the value of blame and anger, and the normativity of fittingness.
My dissertation committee includes David Brink (co-chair), Dana Nelkin (co-chair), Saba Bazargan-Forward, Yuan Yuan and David Wiens (Political Science). During the 2025–2026 academic year, I will be a visiting graduate student at Warwick (autumn) and Oxford (winter).
You can get in touch at fray [at] ucsd [dot] edu.
research.
publications
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In Their Name: On the State's Standing to Hold Marginalised Offenders to Account (Legal Theory, 2025)
According to a widely held view, states responsible for structural injustice lack the standing to hold marginalized offenders to account. I raise doubts about this. I begin by showing that this popular view sits uneasily with the thought that states hold offenders to account in their people's name: when A holds B accountable in the name of C, A’s own hypocrisy and complicity seem insufficient to undermine her standing to hold B accountable. There is, in other words, a gap between a state's own responsibility for structural injustice and its compromised standing. After motivating this challenge, I consider one response according to which the people of a structurally unjust state have lost their standing with respect to marginalized offenders and the state, qua representative, inherits the compromised standing of its people. I examine two ways of making this response precise. Neither, I argue, succeeds in vindicating the view that structurally unjust states lack the standing to hold marginalised offenders to account — at least not in its standard form.
under review
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Understanding the Standing to Blame (title changed for anonymity)
The intuitive data about standing concern cases in which it seems appropriate to dismiss or silence another person’s blame. These data raise two questions. The first is metaphysical: what do judgments about standing track? The second is normative: are such judgments correct? I argue for a novel answer to the metaphysical question, and show how it reshapes the normative one. I then defend the correctness of our core standing judgments.
in progress
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Anger, Aptness, and Autonomy
It is natural to think that anger at wrongdoing can be justified even when it is instrumentally bad for us. A popular way of explaining this thought is to say that wrongdoing itself calls for anger. Call this the aptness claim. I argue that the standard arguments for this claim do not succeed. I offer an alternative explanation, one that appeals to a moderate form of subjectivism about the personal good. Crudely put, I argue that anger can be justified, non-instrumentally, when an agent has autonomously settled on anger as their way of taking wrongdoing seriously.
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Wrongs, Regret, and Liability to Harm
I consider whether wrongdoers might sometimes be liable to suffer harm so that they come to regret what they have done, where the regret is prudential rather than moral. I argue that in certain carefully specified cases, they are. I conclude by examining the implications for self-defense and punishment.
teaching.
as discussion instructor/ teaching assistant
Moral, Legal and Political Philosophy
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PHIL 50: Law and Society. Foundations in philosophy of law: property, tort, contract, civil liberties, democracy, rule of law, civil liberties, judicial review.
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PHIL 27: Ethics and Society I. Distributive justice and identity: Marx, Hayek, Rawls, Dworkin, Kymlicka.
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PHIL 27: Ethics and Society I. Topics in ethical theory: utilitarianism, communitarianism, sources of normativity, moral realism.
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PHIL 28: Ethics and Society II. Topics in applied ethics: war, compensation, immigration.
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PHIL 28: Ethics and Society II. Civic engagement: free speech, voting, civil disobedience, conscientious objection.
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PHIL 28: Ethics and Society II. Liberalism and justice: Mill, Nozick, Rawls.
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PHIL 28: Ethics and Society II. Ethics and AI: privacy, hate speech, polarization.
Humanities (College Writing)
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HUM 1: Foundations of Western Civilization - Israel and Greece. Homer, The Odyssey; The Tanakh; Plato, Republic, Meno; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Sophocles, Antigone; Aristophanes, Lysistrata; Euripides, Medea.
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HUM 1: Foundations of Western Civilization - Israel and Greece. Homer, The Odyssey; The Tanakh; Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito; Sophocles, Antigone; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound; Aristophanes, The Clouds.
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HUM 2: Rome, Christianity, and the Middle Ages. Virgil, The Aeneid; The New Testament; Ovid, Metamorphoses; St Augustine, Confessions; The Quran; Arabian Nights; Rumi, Selected Poems; Beowulf; Dante, Divine Comedy; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.
other
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Spring 2025. Guest lecturer for PHIL 50: Law & Society.
Lectured on Jeremy Waldron's The Core of the Case Against Judicial Review)
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2022–present. Volunteer instructor for Corrupt the Youth, San Diego.
Designed and taught classes in moral and political philosophy to high school seniors.
Topics taught: immigration, drug criminalization, distributive justice, gun control.
