I am currently 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 May of 2008. I am on leave in 2008, and have spent the spring and summer as a visiting fellow in the Moral Psychology and Moral Realism research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. My interests range widely across areas of philosophy that are in some way connected with metaethics; a few of them are summarized here.
Right now I’m very interested in the prospects and problems for expressivism, an important view about moral thought and language that has also recently been applied in the theory of content, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. It is one of the ‘going options’ in metaethics, but I think the respectability of expressivism is premature, because so few of its semantic commitments have yet been successfully discharged. For example, expressivists are committed to the view that all natural-language constructions work in the same way for both moral and descriptive predicates, but no expressivist has yet given an adequate account of negation, and expressivists have barely even begun to think about, for example, tense, modals, natural-language conditionals, or even quantifier expressions.
I’m interested in exploring the semantic commitments of expressivism, and in seeing to what extent they can be discharged. For example, I claim to be able to give the only constructive expressivist account of the truth-conditional connectives – the only expressivist account that solves the ‘negation problem’ – so I think that given certain respectable assumptions, a semantics can be constructed for a very simple expressivist language on which we can give an adequate account of logical inconsistency, entailment, and validity. But in my second book, Being For, I argue that such a semantics cannot be expanded to deal with the full range of natural-language constructions. So I think that this proves that expressivism is interesting and coherent, but false. More recently I've been thinking about the relationship between expressivism and nondescriptivist philosophical projects outside of metaethics, including deflationism about truth and non-truth-conditional accounts of conditionals.
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.
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. This year I'm on leave from teaching, and trying write a more introductory book on Noncognitivism in Ethics, as well as to wrap up some other projects and begin a few new ones. One of my new projects is to try to think in more detail about what the virtues of an expressivist account of truth would be, including in connection with the paradoxes, and another is to develop some ideas I've had for a long time about reasons for belief, that I hope will have a payoff in epistemology.