Research Interests: Ethics, Epistemology, Metaethics (esp. Moral Psychology)

In crudest summary, I write about being a good person in a bad and confusing world. Most of my work falls within what I call non-ideal moral psychology, by which I mean that I am particularly interested in how to think about motivation and praise for messy, complicated, real-life humans who exhibit a great deal of moral uncertainty and moral ignorance and must also face surrounding circumstances that are often deeply unjust or otherwise profoundly morally challenging. In this vein I have published work on the nature and value of explicitly moral motivation (the kind of motivation that we express by saying "I just want to do the right thing!") and of implicitly moral motivation (the kind of motivation that we express by saying things like "I'm just trying not to be a jerk!"), on how to regulate your actions and manage your beliefs in response to moral uncertainty (i.e. when you can tell that lots of important things are at stake in your circumstances but you can't tell how to strike the right balance between them), and on how to evaluate people who act poorly because they are well-meaning but morally mistaken (i.e. they care about the right things, but they are wrong about what that which they care about actually consists in, with the result that they end up undermining the very things that they were trying to promote).

In contrast to much of the existing literature on agency and responsibility, I am a lot more interested in praiseworthiness than blameworthiness: I want to know what it is for people to merit approval in light of their motivations and in light of their actions, as well as the ways in which these two types of praiseworthiness are interrelated -- that is to say, not only the ways in which our actions reveal our motivations, but also the ways in which we can attempt to actively shape our own motivations through our actions. I also want to know which conditions affect the appropriateness of expressions of praise independently of the praiseworthiness of those being praised (e.g. it would set too low a bar; it would be distracting; it would be manipulative). I think that we all should be interested in much more than simply avoiding blameworthiness, so I hope that my research will help those who engage with it to set our sights a bit higher. And I find edifying the thought that most of us are deeply flawed individuals who nonetheless manage to have quite a few redeeming features, so I hope that my research will help those who engage with it to see the glitter through the fog.