Princeton University

Specialization: Normative Political Theory

Katie is currently lead instructor for a freshman writing seminar on just war theory. She has also been an A.I. for Politics 313, Global Justice; Politics 308, Ethics and Public Policy; and Politics 210, Introduction to Poliical Theory. In June 2005 she was one of four recipients of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni Teaching Award.

A.B., magna cum laude, Harvard University (Social Studies)

Thesis Title: Risk as a Distributive Concern

Committee: Charles Beitz, Philip Pettit

Abstract: My dissertation, Risk as a Distributive Concern, has grown out of my interest in issues that highlight open normative questions in political philosophy. In it, I argue that distributive theories, and political theories more generally, have neglected a pressing source of fairness claims that may be made on behalf of citizens against the state and against one another. Public and private institutions manipulate the levels and kinds of risks faced by individuals in nearly every decision that they make, but the normative guidance available for such decisions is slim. What guidance there is comes from a narrow set of predominant legal and economic theories which I reject. These theories argue, in one way or another, that the moral content of a risk can be derived in its entirety from something about that risk's outcome - either its actual manifestation, or a measurement of its expectation. I reject theories that are wholly outcome-based and argue that a risk should be thought of as a thing harmful in itself. That is, we may say that an individual has been harmed when a risk has been imposed upon her, even if that risk never manifests into an actual injury, and even if she is never aware that that risk was ever in place. If this is true, then the resultant strong presumption against risking means that any decision to expose citizens to risk must be accompanied by reasons of justification that do not trivially appeal to considerations of favorable anticipated outcomes. I argue that the preeminent constraint upon these reasons will be considerations of distributive fairness with regard to risk exposure, and that these ex-ante distributive requirements will at times force a deviation from outcomes considered to be optimal by a wide range of traditional distributive theories.

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Link to: Personal Web site