I am an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. This page contains information about some of my research, and accompanying pages contain links to some of my current and published work, and information for students in my courses.
I’m originally from Wisconsin; in 2000 I received my undergraduate degree from Carleton College, in philosophy, mathematics, and economics. In 2004 I received my PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, and I spent two years teaching at the University of Maryland before coming to USC in 2006. I was tenured in April of 2008. My interests range widely across areas of philosophy that are in some way connected with metaethics, including topics in epistemology, metaphysics, normative ethics, practical reason, and the philosophy of language; I have also published on the history of ethics.
Much of my recent work has focused on problems facing and issues surrounding expressivism, a kind of semantic theory most associated with applications in metaethics, but which can also be naturally applied to a wide range of other domains. In my second book, Being For, I argued that expressivism is coherent and interesting, but an unpromising hypothesis about natural language semantics, by showing how a group of straightforward problems besetting expressivism can be solved, but arguing that the solution constrains the course of downstream problems, making them even more difficult.
More recently I have been thinking about the virtues of expressivism as a theory of truth, as well as about possible applications to epistemic modals and conditionals, and about the relationship between expressivism and relativism. Most recently, I have been trying to think about how to generalize on the virtues of expressivism in these domains, and to what extent they might be duplicated within a different semantic framework. I've also become interested in the extent to which non-standard semantic frameworks like expressivism can be re-cast as competing theories about the nature of propositions.
I've recently been thinking a lot about the logic and semantics of 'ought' and other deontic modals, including 'may' and 'must'. I'm particularly interested in the hypothesis that these terms need to be interpreted as semantically uniform across epistemic and deontic readings, which would sharply constrain the valid inferential principles governing deontic modals to match the valid inferential principles governing epistemic modals, and would also tightly constrain theorizing about both the semantics and metaphysics of deontic modals. This hypothesis would therefore have very large implications for both metaethics and normative theory.
Much of my work has concerned the connection between rationality and reasons; recently I've been thinking a lot about various versions of the 'wrong kind of reasons' problem. One version of the problem that concerns me is this: it is often supposed that the only reasons which can affect the rationality of belief are evidential, in the sense that R is a reason to believe P only if R is evidence that P, and R is a reason not to believe P only if R is evidence that ~P. I think this mistakenly overgeneralizes on its promising first conjunct - it is true that the only right-kind reasons to believe that p are evidence that p, but not all right-kind reasons not to believe that p are evidence that ~p. Similarly, it is widely assumed that right-kind reasons for intention track reasons for action, in the sense that R is a right-kind reason to intend to do A only if it is a reason to do A, and R is a right-kind reason not to intend to do A only if it is a reason to not do A. Again, I think this overgeneralizes on its promising first conjunct: the only right-kind reasons to intend to do A are reasons to do A, but there are right-kind reasons to not intend to do A that are not reasons to not do A. I believe that paying strict attention to this observation will much more tightly constrain the options in attempts to theorize about the 'right kind of reasons' - for example, it serves to refute the 'object-given'/'state-given' distinction as even extensionally correct. And I believe that it has deeper consequences for our understanding of rational belief and rational intention, as well.
It is widely acknowledged that some reasons depend on psychological features of agents. For example, the fact that there will be dancing at the party may be a reason for those who like to dance to go there, but not for others to. According to the Humean Theory of Reasons, all reasons fall into this category. The Humean Theory is of central interest to ethical theory, partly because it raises doubts about whether there are any categorical requirements of morality. But it is also unpopular for precisely this reason. Many arguments have been offered which purport to show that no version of the Humean Theory could possibly be true. But I believe that the Humean Theory and its resources have been much misunderstood. In a series of papers and in my first book, Slaves of the Passions, I've been defending a version of the Humean Theory that I call 'Hypotheticalism', which I claim escapes every objection to the Humean Theory.
I’m interested in this project largely because I think that I’ve been able to diagnose and draw out some very important background assumptions that are often made without argument in the literature on practical reason, and I hope that I’ve made some progress on thinking about how to evaluate those assumptions, once they are made explicit. One aspect of this project that I’m still actively thinking about is how to further develop my account of the weight of reasons, and draw out lessons from the account about moral particularism and Hume’s Law.
Consequentialists hold that facts about what we ought to do need to be explained by facts about how good the results of our actions would be. It is widely supposed to have a deep and abiding appeal over ordinary deontological views that apparently do better at capturing our moral intuitions. I'm interested in where this appeal comes from, and whether it transfers whole cloth or in part to views that seek to generalize on consequentialism but substitute an 'agent-relative' relation for ordinary goodness. In a series of recent papers I’ve been developing a set of arguments which I think show that it is very unpromising to think that agent-relative teleological views retain the main attractions of consequentialism.
In general, I’m particularly interested in why it is that consequentialists find deontological views so puzzling. In part, I think, it is due to imposing a formal framework on deontological views that is not the best framework within which to develop those views. In the longer run, I’m interested in developing what I think are the right formal tools for deontologists, and explaining why this makes such an important difference to how the view is perceived.
Moral theories generally purport to be explanatory. But very little has been said explicitly about how we might expect explanations of moral phenomena to differ from explanations of ordinary descriptive phenomena. I think this neglected question is deeply important, and that different moral philosophers are often committed to different, sometimes deeply surprising, theories about how explanations in moral theory must be different from explanations that we give of other kinds of thing. An important view to which I think many moral philosophers are implicitly committed is what I call the Standard Model Theory, which I explain and discuss in several papers and in my first book. I hope eventually to pursue this topic in a more systematic way, as I think it has been particularly important in the history of moral philosophy, and has wide implications in, for example, the philosophy of law.
What is a philosophical reduction? When do reductive views count as realist and when as eliminativist, about their subject matters? What problems are reductions well-suited to solve? Can a reduction make smooth the ways for the epistemology of the reduced domain, without running afoul of the Open Question argument? And if so, how? I’m a proponent of reductive realism about the normative, and actively interested in developing a more helpful positive picture about what reduction is all about than is currently prevalent in the literature. I set out some of my views in Slaves of the Passions and in a few articles.
I'm also interested in many other topics, including the epistemology of perception, 'wide-scope' accounts of practical and theoretical rationality, and the history of ethical theory, particularly in Kant.