Broadly speaking, I write about what, and how, to value - to love, respect, cherish, desire, and regret - as creature vulnerable to time and chance.

My dissertation, The Work of Love, accounts for the value of love and leverages the account to probe the nature of valuing. I ask, why love a person?, and answer, because your loving relationship with him goes well — because you are what I call attuned. This story denies a pervasive current of ethical thought, on which the value of loving, caring, respecting, and so on, resides in appreciating things for their intrinsic value, their merits or moral importance.

I end on a relational conjecture: the value of love is isomorphic to the value of a person’s other attitudes, meaning their value depends to their contribution to how well she relates to things .

I’m working on papers that defend the dissertation’s conjecture by accounting for respect for persons. I analyze respect as virtuous interaction constituting multigenerational moral relations. I then motivate the account by its fruits; it solves problems about the nature and dynamics of moral emotion.

Another branch of my research explains what value is. In this vein, I am working on case-studies about attitudes that constrain and reveal the limits of these explanations — attitudes like unquestionable commitments, self-loathing, and subjunctive regret. I also have a paper that explores the impact of contingent, even arbitrary, facts about psychology and sociality on explaining why things matter.

Finally, I have a multi-disciplinary book project that reconstructs the Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali’s moral epistemology. This project is only partly exegetical: mainly, I explore whether al-Ghazali adequately addresses the tension between following the shari’a and striving to be moral, a tension that appears in real-life practical reasoning (as documented by ethnographies of everyday Muslim life).