I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas. I got my degree in May of 2007 from the University of California, San Diego. I work mainly in ethics, and I have a growing interest in the history of that subject, especially the British Moralists, Hutcheson through Mill.
My most recent in-print or forthcoming papers are "Preferences, Welfare, and the Status-Quo Bias" in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, "Weak Anti-Rationalism and the Demands of Morality", forthcoming in Noûs; "The Hedonist's Dilemma", forthcoming in the Journal of Moral Philosophy; "Hume's Internalism Reconsidered", which is out now in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, "Aggregation, Partiality, and the Strong Beneficence Principle," which is available in draft form here, or is also available via Philosophical Studies' "Online First" series of papers. "Toward a Theory of the Basic Minimum" came out in 2008 in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. "Three Arguments for Perfectionism" is forthcoming in Nous, and "Headaches, Lives, and Value," appeared in the January, 2009 edition Utilitas.
For those interested in my papers in progress, in "Relativism and Consructivism," I argue that at least one version of a Humean constructivism can avoid moral relativism. "Subjectivism without Desire" argues that something like welfare coherentism is far more plausible than standard desiderative accounts of subjectivism about welfare. In "Two Problems for Constructivism and How to Solve Them", I argue that constructivist theories face two problems, and I argue that they can be avoided if we understand constructivism as the adoption of a coherence theory of truth for normative sentences. I argue, in "Equality-Tempered Prioritarianism", that the value of welfare benefits is trumped by the value of equality at very high levels of well-being; this helps to solve a worry about prioritarian theories in general. "The Supererogatory and How to Accommodate It" argues that the traditional analysis of supererogatory actions is committed to an implausible set of verdicts about intra-moral rationality. I argue that we should reject the traditional view in favor of a view that can no longer be marshalled against act consequentialism. NOTE: All papers in progress are subject to substantial revision. The papers are in varying states of polish. Please do not cite without permission.
In my spare time I like to watch movies. Besides the obvious, my most recent favorites have been in the American film noir canon (and the French appropriation, especially Clouzot, Becker, and Melville), and the Australian and German New Wave(s). I've also got a soft spot for Bette Davis' sixties-era Grand Guinol thrillers. I also enjoy electronic music production, and can occasionally be caught programming my Yamaha SY77 and Kurzweil K2500RS, and trying to repair and modify my H-112 Hammond Organ. The cartoon above is me after having been "Mad Men"'d.