Contact

   Research & Background

Currently, my central project is an analysis of the nature and moral significance of hope. This analysis involves developing a normative theory and moral psychology of hope, as well as examining how hope functions in concrete settings, especially the clinical care and research settings. The specific questions I am currently working on include: In what ways does hope make us vulnerable to harms such as exploitation? What is the relationship between hope and motivation or practical commitment? In what sense might hope be a social phenomenon? What is the role of hope in scientific and epistemic inquiry?

I started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, having just completed a two-year postdoc at the NIH's Department of Clinical Bioethics. I received my PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I worked on normative ethics and metaethics, primarily with Geoff Sayre-McCord, Thomas Hill Jr., and Simon Blackburn. Before that, I spent two years in the PhD program at the University of California, San Diego, where I worked most closely with David Brink and Pat Kitcher. I have a BA in Philosophy from New York University, and I've lived in ten states. The dog in the picture above is my Great Dane, Zadie.

Click here for a pdf of my CV.

   Online Papers

"Tales Publicly Allowed: Competence, Capacity, and Religious Belief," Hastings Center Report, Jan-Feb 2007. (Links to penultimate draft; please cite published version.)

I argue that, contrary to common theory and practice, we should distinguish between possessing certain decision-making capacities and having the status of a competent decision-maker. Sometimes, a person has value commitments that we ought to respect, but that also interfere with her decision-making capacities; in such cases, we ought to treat the person as a competent decision-maker, while acknowledging that she lacks relevant decision-making capacities.

"How to Argue for the Value of Humanity,"Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, March 2006. (Links to open-access copy on PPQ website.)

Significant effort has been devoted to locating a good argument for Kant's Formula of Humanity. In this paper, I contrast two arguments, based on Kant's text, for the Formula of Humanity. The first, which I call the "Valued Ends" argument, is an influential and appealing argument developed most notably by Christine Korsgaard and Allen Wood. Notwithstanding the appeal and influence of this argument, it ultimately fails on several counts. I therefore present as an alternative the "Autonomy" argument, which is largely inspired by the failings of the Valued Ends argument. (I have come to believe that the Autonomy argument is flawed, but in an informative way. I plan to revisit this argument in the future.)

“Hope Must Be A Minefield” (.pdf)

I argue that hope is a stance taken toward our desires and aims in light of uncertainty and limited control. As such, it is deeply connected to well-functioning human agency and it is a key factor in our ability to work our way in a world we have limited capacity to shape. Yet I also argue that hope is hazardous. It makes us vulnerable to harm from within, in the form of attentional deficits, and from without, in the form of exploitation by those perceived to control the object of hope.

“Hope and Exploitation” (.pdf)

One of the moral hazards in the treatment of and research involving people with advanced illness is taking unfair advantage of the ill person's hope for an unlikely cure. I draw an analysis of hope from recent advances in the philosophy of the emotions and moral psychology, contrast it with existing accounts in the medical and bioethics literature, and demonstrate that there are three distinct ways of exploiting a person's hope for unlikely cure. These distinct forms of exploitation call for distinct remedies, most of which must happen at the institutional and governmental level; individual efforts to be honest and support only "realistic" hope are insufficient.

“Hope, Fantasy, and Commitment” (.pdf)

The standard foil for recent theories of hope is the belief-desire analysis advocated by Hobbes, Day, Downie, and others. According to this analysis, to hope for S is no more and no less than to desire S while believing S is possible but not certain. Opponents of the belief-desire analysis argue that it fails to capture one or another distinctive feature (or function) of hope. Here, I focus on the role of imagination in hope, and discuss its implications for hope's relation to practical commitment or end-setting. I argue that fantasizingÑan imaginative activity with narrative structure and egoistic functionÑis a paradigmatic feature of hope. In attending to the role of fantasizing, we see that the hope for S neither always moves us forward in pursuit of S (contra Victoria McGeer and others), nor always draws on the motivational force of previous commitments to S (contra Cheshire Calhoun).

"Owning Up: The Power of an Apology" (please email me to request a copy)

The most often discussed power of apologies is their ability to make their recipients forgive, and I will address some of the main theories of this power. However, I am primarily interested in a different power: wronged parties are often willing to trade what they see as just retribution for a sincere admission of wrongdoing and an expression of remorse. I argue that, although there are multiple features of apologies contributing to this power, the primary factor is that the person offering the apology makes herself vulnerable to its recipient, and thereby gives the recipient the opportunity to exercise generosity; generosity may be obligatory or supererogatory.

   Upcoming Talks

Conference on the Occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Journal, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. At Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, March 19 & 20, 2008. A fairly short version of the paper that won't wander very far from the contents of the version above. The conference program is available here.

American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division. At the Pasadena Hilton, Pasadena, CA, March 19 - 23, 2008. With comments by Cheshire Calhoun. A very abbreviated version of the paper drawn from the first 10-12 pages of the version above. The conference program, including abstracts and pdf's of submitted papers, is available here.

Symposium on Hope and Care for the Dying. At the University of Washington Department of Philosophy, April 4, 2008. I will be presenting along with Jodi Halpern and Eric Cassell. My talk will draw from three papers: "Hope Must Be A Minefield," "Hope and Exploitation," and "Hope, Fantasy, and Commitment." I will present my own conception of hope, contrast it with the conceptions commonly found in the medical and bioethics literature, and explore the particular challenges hope poses for medical caregivers.

   Courses

   Links

Philosophy Papers Online

Lawrence Hinman's Ethics Updates

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Penn Center for Bioethics