I write about valuing as finite creatures. My work explores the value and foundations of human relationships, historical contingency, and such responses as love, mattering, and respect.

In my dissertation, The Work of Love, I justify interpersonal love and explain its value, to illuminate how value and valuing are related more generally. If the world contains countless people, why distinguish a given person by loving them? I answer, because your loving relationship is going well — because you fit or are attuned to each other. This suggests that to respond as we should, as good people and friends, is not just to value persons and things on the basis of their inherent value. Major value theories are wrong; appreciating the constituents of valuable objects won’t suffice for appropriate response. I conjecture that concrete and good ways of relating are the fundamental locus of evaluation.

In further work, I develop a relational theory of the moral. I argue that we relate morally admirably by respecting and cherishing each other; and that moral concern, emotion, and virtue are better explained and evaluated as the building blocks of these relations.

Another branch of research asks (what I argue are) central metanormative questions: Why does anything rather than nothing matter; is it arbitrary that things matter at all? What would it be for F to matter because of contingent facts about us?

Finally, I am finishing three papers about practical reasoning and the past, arguing:

That deeply-held attachments can permissibly resist etiological debunking arguments.
That some losses are unfitting to regret by thinking, “I wish that lost good never existed.”
That al-Ghazali’s moral psychology and epistemology show us how to intelligibly treat religious traditions as reasons for action over and beyond moral obligation, without assuming divine command theory. The upshot is ethnographic: we can make better sense of real-life Muslim deliberators.