I write about human attachments and responses to value — especially about the ways in which our vulnerability to time and chance shape what, and how, to love, respect, cherish, desire, and regret.

My dissertation explores the ethics of love and its underlying theory of valuing. I ask, why love people?, and answer, because we love them well. Specifically, I develop the theory that love for a person is well-founded or appropriate when a historically contingent loving relationship with him is well-going, and that to so relate is to be (what I call) mutually attuned . This story mounts a rebellion against the traditional idea that it is good and appropriate to care about things entirely for the sake of what gives them intrinsic value: their merits or moral import.

The dissertation explores ‘well-going personal relations’ as a notion distinct from and more fundamental than appreciating value in the world. My work continues to develop this approach by extending it to illuminate surprising connections between the evaluation and dynamics of moral regard and moral emotion, and to explain when our attachments should become immune from doubt.

A second branch of my research examines attitudes that are troubling for what they reveal about the limits of explaining why things matter - regretting existence, self-loathing, and arbitrary desire.

Finally, I have a project reconstructing the moral epistemology al-Ghazali develops to address tensions between cleaving to tradition and striving to be moral. This work grapples with texts and the uptake of ideas - as documented by ethnographic work on the Muslim world - in real-life practical reasoning.