Research
My research focuses on the normative dimensions of human agency, with a particular eye towards understanding the nature and ethics of blame, our status as morally responsibility agents, and the proper roles for wholeheartedness and ambivalence in a well-lived human life.
I am currently revising In Praise of Ambivalence (under contract with Oxford University Press), which explores the significant value of ambivalence, the wide-spread perils of wholeheartedness, and what it means to be a well-functioning agent. Here is a brief précis (ms. draft available on request).
I'm also working with Neal Tognazzini on a project that explores the practices that (i) facilitate our relationships with one another and (ii) give those relationships their value. To this end, we develop accounts of love, blame, forgiveness, and faith, emphasizing not only the emotional elements of these phenomena (as P.F. Strawson usefully suggested), but also their volitional elements as well.
Here's a brief CV. Below you'll find some of my work organized (roughly) by topic.
I am currently revising In Praise of Ambivalence (under contract with Oxford University Press), which explores the significant value of ambivalence, the wide-spread perils of wholeheartedness, and what it means to be a well-functioning agent. Here is a brief précis (ms. draft available on request).
I'm also working with Neal Tognazzini on a project that explores the practices that (i) facilitate our relationships with one another and (ii) give those relationships their value. To this end, we develop accounts of love, blame, forgiveness, and faith, emphasizing not only the emotional elements of these phenomena (as P.F. Strawson usefully suggested), but also their volitional elements as well.
Here's a brief CV. Below you'll find some of my work organized (roughly) by topic.
Blame
Moral Responsibility
Ambivalence
Miscellanea
- Blame: Its Nature and Norms (w/ Neal A. Tognazzini)
- The Ethics of Blame: A Primer
- The Epistemic Norm of Blame
- Gratitude and Resentment: Some Asymmetries
- The Contours of Blame (w/ Neal A. Tognazzini)
- The Nature and Ethics of Blame (w/ Neal A. Tognazzini)
- Blame (with Neal A. Tognazzini)
Moral Responsibility
- Strawson's Modest Transcendental Argument
- Hard Incompatibilism and the Participant Attitude
- Reasons-Responsiveness and Degrees of Responsibility (w/ Philip Swenson)
- Being More (or Less) Blameworthy
- Degrees of Moral Responsibility
- The Basic Argument and Modest Moral Responsibility
- In Defense of Love Internalism
- Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol 5: Essays on themes from the work of Gary Watson (w/ Neal A. Tognazzini)
- Compatibilism (w/ Michael McKenna)
- Manipulation and Independence
- No (New) Troubles With Ockhamism (w/ Garrett Pendergraft)
- (Slightly) Extending the Limits of Blame
- Review of Neil Levy's Consciousness and Moral Responsibility
- Review of Tamler Sommers' Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility
Ambivalence
- A Wholehearted Defense of Ambivalence
- Review of Hili Razinsky's Ambivalence: A Philosophical Investigation
- In Praise of Ambivalence
Miscellanea
- An Actual-Sequence Theory of Promotion
- Review of Stephen Darwall's Honor, History, and Relationship: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics II
- Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences (w/ Eric Schwitzgebel, Joshua Rust, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, and Alan Moore)
- Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Mechanism: Experiments on Folk Intuitions," (with Eddy Nahmias and Trevor Kvaran)