Contact

   Research & Background

I am most interested in what it is to be a moral agent. I am especially interested in moral deliberation and practical reasoning. In broadest terms, my work examines the relation between practical reasoning and our non-rational faculties, our rationally optional values and commitments, and our capacity to be self-determining or autonomous. Although I always aim to develop general theories at fairly high levels of abstraction, I carry out much of this examination on the ground, so to speak, by analyzing the interplay between practical reasoning, non-rational faculties and values, and autonomy in the context of clinical care and research.

Currently, I have two primary projects. First, I am writing a series a papers that asks what specific value commitments, if any, are presupposed by rational deliberation and action. Second, in another series of papers, I explore the interaction between the emotions and practical reasoning; I am especially interested in hope, and how the exercise of imagination involved in hope influences, and is influenced by, practical reasoning.

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 on it for some Dane silliness.

Click here for a pdf of my CV.

   Online Papers

“Hopes and Dreams” forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Fall 2010).

Argues against the "motivation" conception of hope—according to which hope is a special kind of motivational force—and in favor of the orthodox view that the motivational element of hope is simply desire for the object of hope. However, a common way of expressing hope is to fantasize about the object of hope, and fantasies can influence motivation in ways that mere desire cannot.

“Hope and Exploitation,” Hastings Center Report (38) 5, 2008. (Links to penultimate draft; please cite published version.)

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.

“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.)

"Owning Up and Lowering Down: The Power of Apology" (.pdf)

Apologies are strange. They are, in a certain sense, very small. An apology is just a gesture—a set of words, a physical posture, perhaps a gift. But an apology can also be very powerful—this power is implicit in the facts that it can be difficult to offer an apology and that, when we are wronged, we may want an apology very much. More, even we have been severely wronged, we are sometimes willing to forgive or pardon the wrongdoer, if we receive a sincere apology. In this paper, I want to begin to figure out how a mere gesture can be so powerful. The philosophers who discuss apology generally do not go into much detail, and they discuss it almost exclusively in connection with forgiveness. I, too, discuss apology's power to motivate forgiveness, but in order to provide the resources to examine another power. Some apologies, I argue, lack the power to motivate forgiveness, but nevertheless have the power to motivate the recipient to maintain a relationship with the wrongdoer, or allow the wrongdoer to remain in her community. Thus, the puzzle case I wish to solve is how an apology can provide a reason to maintain a relationship with a wrongdoer, even while failing to provide a reason to forgive him. My strategy is to, first, establish how an apology can succeed in providing a decisive reason to forgive: by demonstrating that the wrongdoer's will has changed in the right way. Then, I will how an apology can provide a reason to maintain a relationship with someone whose will has not changed in the right way: by invoking a kind of noblesse oblige on the part of the recipient, an obligation to help the wrongdoer change his will.

   Upcoming Talks

“Ethics and Animal Capacities,” Society for Philosophy and Psychology, University of Indiana at Bloomington, June 12-14, 2009.

As part of a workshop with Colin Allen http://mypage.iu.edu/~colallen/, Martha Farah http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~mfarah/, and Valerie Hardcastle http://asweb.artsci.uc.edu/collegedepts/philosophy/fac_staff/profile_details.aspx?ePID=MjAyMjYw, I will be discussing the four major ways that moral philosophers have sought to ground moral obligations to nonhuman animals in the fact that those animals have certain capacities: First, there is the consequentialist view developed by Singer and others, that animals have certain interests in virtue of their capacities, and those interests must be weighed in consideration with human interests. Second, there is the rights-based view developed by Regan and others, that animals have rights in virtue of the possession of certain capacities. Third, there is the species-based view developed by Diamond, Kittay, and others, that animals participate in certain forms of life partially in virtue of their capacities, and obligations arise within a form of life. Finally, there is the Kantian view developed by Korsgaard and Wood, that we have obligations to nonhuman animals in virtue of the facts they share some our capacities, and we necessarily value those capacities in ourselves.

“Valuing Animal Nature,” Society for Applied Philosophy, Leeds University, June 26-28, 2009.

Recently, both Allen Wood and Christine Korsgaard have argued that the Kantian moral systems they advocate do not leave out nonhuman animals, as Kantian theories are generally believed to do. According both systems, whether a creature has obligations depends on it having the capacity to conceive of and govern itself according to laws (“rational capacity”), but whether a creature has obligations owed to it does not depend on it having this capacity. Korsgaard argues that we necessarily value our animal nature as an end in itself and that we are therefore required to value the same animal nature found in nonhuman animals. Wood argues that nonhuman animalsÕ desires and sensibilities are “analogous” to the rational capacity to which we owe respect, and are therefore owed an analogue to respect.

I propose to examine these ways of grounding our obligations to nonhuman animals, with particular attention to, first, KorsgaardÕs claim that we necessarily value our animal nature and, second, WoodÕs claim that certain animal capacities are “analogous” to the specific rational capacity at the heart of Kantian ethics. Both of these claims attempt to bridge a gap between our rational capacity and non-rational capacities that we share with nonhuman animals. Properly evaluating these claims requires a detailed account of the role that inclination and sensibility play in nonhuman animal behavior and in human action. I will argue that Korsgaard's account is better equipped than Wood's to bridge the gap between rationality and other animal capacities. That is, if she is right about why we must value our rational capacity, then she may very well be able to establish that we must also value some of the non-rational capacities we share with nonhuman animals. Unfortunately, she is probably not right about why we must value our rational capacity.

“Owning Up and Lowering Down: The Power of Apology,” British Society for Ethical Theory, Leeds University, July 13-15, 2009.

See abstract above.

   Courses Taught

Introduction to Ethics (both large lecture and freshman seminar versions)
Biomedical Ethics (large lecture)
Freedom of the Will (advanced seminar)

Survey of 20th Century Metaethics
The Emotions in Contemporary Moral Theory
Derek Parfit's Climbing the Mountain
Value Theory Workshop: Writing for Publication

   The Smartin Workshops

Matthew Smith and I organize an annual works-in-progress workshop. The topic changes each year, but we always aim to bring together junior and more established scholars from different areas within philosophy as well as from cognate disciplines. The links below will take you to the programs for the last three workshops.

2009: Imagination, Mind, and Morality
2008: Narrative and the Construction of the Self
2007: Trust and Testimony