research

My work probes how (if at all) human finitude - our vulnerability to time and contingency - and relationships shape what to value, and how to value it, and why.

the work of love

an inquiry into the good

To be appropriately loved is among what matters most to people, but it is not clear how to understand this observation, and whether it can be vindicated. The dissertation offers an account - an ethic of love - and explores the entanglement between it and why anything is good. What is the tie between loving people (and other things) and value? How are we to love, and why love like that? I answer by appeal to an unnoticed relational value: love, I argue, is made appropriate by a relationship of fit that is fashions with its object. One clarified, this view challenges an ancient yet widespread idea that the norm of human valuing is to revere a preexisting good. Instead, I motivate a new picture: to value is to do something - an activity - warranted by the good it constitutes. I trace a path then from the ethics of love to foundational issues: good’s dependence on us, the assessment of human valuers, the role of contingency in practical reason, and the ethics of reciprocity.

other papers

[a paper tethering the propriety of respect and moral emotion to the moral relationships they constitute]

[a paper, inspired by recent work on settled belief, arguing the rationality of attachments doesn’t turn on their origins - typically, unruly - but on the reasons why they become unquestionable]

[a paper embedding “mere” desire in holistic contexts, then arguing against a widespread foundationalism about ‘reasons for reasons to act’]

[a paper reconstructing al-Ghazali’s view on the problem of how some arbitrary social norms and traditions are, nonetheless, authoritative]

[a paper exploring reconciliation in intergenerational relationships]