I write about the evaluation of human relationships, attachments, and emotions. I’m especially interested in how, as finite and interdependent creatures, to respond to what we value.

What is it to love well? Why love a given person? In my dissertation, The Work of Love, I offer the same answer to both questions. Love is justified by what makes a relationship go well—by attunement to a person. This account, I argue, supports a general claim: that the quality of how we relate to things— as friends, partners, brothers, curators, and so on—is more fundamental than appreciating them for their inherent value, in the manner they call for. This dissertation aims then to develop an account of the value of love, and to thereby start to sketch a theory of human valuing.

In another work-in-progress, I argue that solidarity is an ideal for distinctly moral relations between creatures like us—agents inevitably anchored in contingent historical circumstances. I appeal to this ideal to work out a standard for the moral evaluation of motivation and emotion.

Another project is a metanormative study. It is popular of late to individuate a whole class of values in terms of the attitudes that they merit (e.g. the fearsome merits fear, the admirable merits admiration , the desirable merits desire). I argue that this proposal faces a Euthyphro challenge, in secular guise. Is what matters created or found by us? As I argue, the fact that something is to be feared, admired, or desired calls out for explanation—the link between objects and attitudes isn’t arbitrary—but neither detection, nor metaphysical constitution, satisfactorily explain the link.

Finally, I am working on the role of historical and counterfactual thought in practical reasoning. I argue that:

Partiality resists genealogical debunking, since practices of partiality have the rational structure of resolution in the face of temptation, and conviction in the face of doubt.
It can be unfitting to respond to loss by thinking, “I wish that lost good never existed.”
al-Ghazali’s solution to a puzzle about moral understanding and arbitrary religious traditions casts light on a distinctive way that the right, the good, and the contingent might depend on each other.