I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. I received my PhD from Princeton University in 2012.
I'm most interested in the "big questions" of moral philosophy and methodology: What is fundamentally worth caring about? What should we do about it? And, as philosophers, what concepts and methods should we use for making progress on these vitally important questions?
An overview of the answers I offer to these questions can be found here.
In short: I think we should fundamentally care that each individual's life goes well, and this concern should aggregate so that we prefer greater over lesser improvements to overall welfare. In practice, we should seek opportunities to help others effectively, while respecting commonsense constraints for reasons of non-ideal decision theory. (The latter is something that many philosophers seem deeply confused about.) As for philosophical methodology, I think ethical theorists have exaggerated the significance of deontic questions, and there are deeper telic questions which are both (i) more likely to generate deep understanding and philosophical progress, and (ii) more intrinsically significant and apt to care about.
I am the author of Parfit's Ethics, published by Cambridge University Press, and numerous articles in journals including Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. I deeply value public philosophy, especially on topics of practical import. I co-authored (with Peter Singer) an op-ed on pandemic ethics for the Washington Post in early 2020, and serve as lead editor for the open-access textbook, An Introduction to Utilitarianism. My substack, Good Thoughts, has over 5,000 subscribers.
Links