Aidan Kestigian

Visiting Assistant Professor

Education

Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University
M.S. Carnegie Mellon University
B.A. Wheaton College (MA)

About

During the 2019-2020 academic year I’ll be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy teaching PHIL 125: Logic. By day I’m a program manager at Tufts University working on research and teaching projects at the intersection of ethics, mathematics, and policy surrounding political and racial gerrymandering. My research focuses on ethical questions about democratic voting. In particular, I’m interested in the question of whether voters in democratic societies have a duty to vote a particular way, or consult particular kinds of motivations or information when they make their vote choice.

Publications

Aidan Kestigian. (2018). “Freedom as Non-Domination in Behavioral and Biomedical Research.” Research Ethics 14.3, 1-15.

Aidan Kestigian. (2017). “Blogging as Practice in Applied Philosophy.” Teaching Philosophy 40.2, 181-200.

Aidan Kestigian and Alex John London. (2016). “Adversaries at the Bedside: Advance Care Plans and Future Welfare.” Bioethics 30.8, 557-567.

Teaching Interests

My classes aim to help students effectively engage with and critically evaluate the social and political institutions around them. I’ve written a paper about how to incorporate policy analysis into applied ethics and political philosophy classes as the undergraduate level, and spent some time consulting for instructors interested in improving their courses as a teaching fellow at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence. Most recently, I designed and co-taught a course on the ethics of automation and AI with friend and colleague Máté Szabó, a historian and philosopher of computing and logic, and worked with students to develop tools and organize a workshop to help teachers integrate material on gerrymandering and redistricting into their classes.

Research Interests

Within democratic theory, I am interested in the moral duties that voters have (or do not have), and whether we can expect real voters to live up to their duties in practice. This topic is the main focus of my dissertation, which focused on the duties of voters within deliberative democratic theory. You can read my dissertation here. I also have research interests in applied ethics, and in particular, ethical questions surrounding interpersonal relationships in research and medicine. You can read my papers and synopses here.

Department(s)

Philosophy

Program(s)

Office

Knapton 121

Hours

Monday 5:00-6:00 p.m. and by appointment