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I work in ethics, on authoritative norms and objective values. My dissertation explored the role of desires in choice and of personal commitments in practical deliberation.
My present work concerns:
I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in Spring 2025, and pursued my dissertation under the mentorship of Nandi Theunissen, Japa Pallikkathayil, James Shaw, Stephen Finlay, and Hille Paakkunainen. 
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Hot Off the Press
When Reasons Run Out, Phil. Quarterly.
Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not simply because favoring is a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something solely on the basis that she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason.
The Normative Insignificance of the Will, Phil. Studies.
The fact that I am a committed gardener has some practical upshot or other. But what, exactly, is the upshot of the fact that I am committed to some project, person, or principle? According to a standard view, my commitment to gardening provides me with or constitutes a further reason to garden, beyond whatever reasons arise from the commitment-independent merits of gardening. I argue that we should reject this conception of commitment’s practical upshot and its attendant psychological story involving the will. According to the view I develop here, a commitment to X is a decision to take seriously the reasons to which X gives rise, and where necessary, to give those reasons an elevated place in one’s practical thinking.
When Reasons Run Out, Phil. Quarterly.
Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not simply because favoring is a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something solely on the basis that she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason.
The Normative Insignificance of the Will, Phil. Studies.
The fact that I am a committed gardener has some practical upshot or other. But what, exactly, is the upshot of the fact that I am committed to some project, person, or principle? According to a standard view, my commitment to gardening provides me with or constitutes a further reason to garden, beyond whatever reasons arise from the commitment-independent merits of gardening. I argue that we should reject this conception of commitment’s practical upshot and its attendant psychological story involving the will. According to the view I develop here, a commitment to X is a decision to take seriously the reasons to which X gives rise, and where necessary, to give those reasons an elevated place in one’s practical thinking.
In the Pipeline
Reasons as Representatives of Value
Final Preparations
Normative reasons are what normative reasons do. But what do normative reasons do? And how do they do it? To the first question I say that reasons are facts which agents can use to further certain aims, the aims of the practices to which reasons are essentially tied. Since reasons are tied in this way only to the practices of explaining and deliberating, the function of a reason is to help agents achieve their deliberative and explanatory aims. That’s what reasons do. Reasons realize these functions by doing something else, namely bringing values to bear on the agent’s normative situation. On my view, the dark clouds are a reason to take my raincoat because we can use them to invoke the value of staying dry. That's how they help agents figure out what to do. Conceiving of reasons as representatives of value unifies their apparently diverse functions, tames unruly theoretical phenomena, vindicates our common ways of speaking, and lends support to the idea that reasons are socially embedded, public, and shared.
Read Widely, Cite Generously
Under Review
I argue that analytic philosophers should cite more generously than they presently do. My case rests largely on two points: Generous citation practices benefit cited authors and readers and manifest intellectual virtues which philosophers rightly prize. These reasons are undefeated because the case against citing generously is poor and alternative policies are unpromising. Hence citing generously is the most defensible policy for academic philosophers working today. I close with some brief remarks about how to cite generously in conditions of uncertainty.
The Autonomy of Goodness
Final Preparations
T. M. Scanlon attempts to reductively analyze relational goodness and kind-relative goodness in terms of reasons comprising points of view. I make three arguments that these attempts fail. First, the concept of ‘interest’ to which Scanlon appeals faces a dilemma: on a subjective reading, his analysis of kind-relative value is uninformative or false; but when construed objectively, his analysis of relational value is circular. Second, these analyses get the direction of explanation wrong. Whether something benefits me does not metaphysically depend on whether people have a reason to want that for me, even if benefits to me covary with such reasons. Third, kind-relative value is epistemically prior to the interests to which Scanlon pegs it, and facts about kind-relative goodness evolve of their own accord and in ways that changes in interests cannot account for. These arguments suggest that relational and kind-relative goodness are too objective to be identified with facts about perspectives even if, as welfare subjectivists maintain, facts about perspectives play a role grounding benefits. Since Scanlon's analyses develop Ziff's idea that to be good is to answer to some interest, my arguments give us some reason to doubt this basic idea.
What the Cluster View Cannot Do
Under Review
Atomists hold that normative reasons are comprised of a single fact like it is raining. Though atomism is widely assumed, its claim to orthodoxy owes more to the absence of a promising alternative than to its obvious truth. Enter the cluster view. As Fogal & Worsnip develop it, a normative reason consists in several facts all of which are “on an explanatory par.” By contrast, atomists dub one of these facts my reason and regard the others as mere “supporting actors.” My aim in this article is to stick up for the little guy: atomism. F&W attack atomism on two fronts. First, they allege that atomists discriminate arbitrarily between equals. Leveraging concepts from causal modeling, I reveal explanatory asymmetries within clusters which show that some facts are more equal than others. Second, they allege that atomism conflicts with attractive claims about normative explanation. I show that atomism plays nicely with both their preferred theory of reasons (explanationism) and with their principle-mediated conception of normative explanation. Then I press an unpleasant dilemma against the cluster theorist. On the first horn, clusters reduce to atoms. The cluster theorist can avoid this horn by holding that every cluster is irreducibly particular. But then she can't explain how reasons can be shared or survive changes in context. Reasons are atoms either way.
Commitment and Discretion
Presenting at Devotion, Existential Commitment, and Ethics (March '26)
Philosophers have conceived of commitments as source of reasons in order to explain their power to structure our agency. The idea is simply that if I commit to running today, then I can use my commitment as leverage to get myself out of bed tomorrow. If I couldn’t do that, the point of committing in the first place would be lost, they claim. But an excessive focus on the structuring function has made philosophers lose sight of an important fact, namely that we enjoy considerable discretion in how, when, and where we carry out our commitments. The flipside of this discretion is that commitments can survive inaction: A mother can be devoted to her children even though she passes up opportunities to benefit them; and there is nothing inconsistent in the idea that even the most committed runners akratically skip their usual run. Hence my main aim in this paper is to show that the theory of commitment I develop in The Normative Insignificance of the Will both rigid enough to structure agency but sufficiently pliant to account for our discretion in carrying them out.
On the Personal Character of Well-being (with Nandi Theunissen)
Philosophers for whom the good is non-relational, good simpliciter, have long expressed puzzlement over how the good could be relational, good for someone. Relational value theorists have done much to respond to this puzzlement, but a recent challenge by Tom Hurka invites fresh consideration. Taking inspiration from Ross rather than Moore, Hurka urges that the grounds of goodness can be relational, and that once relational grounds are admitted, there is no further role for relationality in a theory of value. For goodness itself, that is, the value that supervenes on relational grounds, is perfectly non-relational. We clarify why relational value theorists make a point of saying that relational value “depends on” the nature of the object, the subject, and their interaction in a way that brings out a genuine contrast with non-relational views. But we also take Hurka’s challenge at face value, clarifying what the supervening evaluative relation is supposed to be, or as we prefer, what is personal rather than impersonal about the resulting value. Our solution turns on the role of activity (rather than states of affairs) in a theory of value. The discussion has implications for perfectionist theories of well-being.
Rigging the Game
The notion that I can unilaterally release myself from a promise is widely regarded as absurd. Now consider Korsgaard’s claim that I am dutybound to grade these papers only if and because I identify with my role as a teacher. If that's true, can't I release myself from this duty by mentally distancing myself from the social role of a teacher? The absurdity of these suggestions reveals a deep constraint on normative theories: we cannot have normative powers which would undermine the very goods that our norms exist to secure.
This constraint is captured by Joseph Raz's claim that we have just those normative powers which it is good for us to have. This principle is the nucleus of the theory of normative powers that I develop here. I incorporate Raz's claim into a larger, two-level theory on which different sets of norms are aimed at the satisfaction of different human needs and the production of different human goods. Because moral norms exist to enable cooperation, create a community of equals, and provide impartial standards for the adjudication of competing claims, we can rule out theories of moral normativity which give individuals the power to avoid accountability to others or to change the rules of the game unilaterally.
I love exchanging my work with others. Please reach out if you want to see any of this work.