I write about what and how to value - to love, respect, cherish, desire, and regret - as dependent, finite creatures.

In my dissertation, The Work of Love, I explain what justifies love and gives it its value, with an eye to illuminating the nature of human valuing. I ask, why love a given person?, and answer, because your relationship with him goes well — because you are what I call attuned. The upshot is that major theories of value and virtue are wrong: we don’t value (love, respect, cherish, desire, etc.) non-defectively by appreciating things for their inherent significance.

Instead, I propose that we value as we should by forging good relationships with what matters to us.

In other work, I defend this conjecture by developing a relational account of morality. I analyze respect for persons as a moral ideal for relationships, as an admirable way to relate to each other as members of multigenerational communities. I motivate this account by its fruits; it solves hard problems about the nature and dynamics of moral regard and emotion.

Another branch of research tackles a foundational question: what is it for things to matter in virtue of contingent facts about human beings and their histories? I reveal the shape of this explanation by analyzing our attitudes towards contingency — attitudes like unquestionable attachment, mere desire, and subjunctive regret.

Finally, I have a side gig reconstructing the philosopher al-Ghazali’s moral epistemology. Partly exegetical, partly anthropological, the project argues for the coherence of conflicts in real-life Muslim deliberation between following arbitrary aspects of shari’a and striving to be good.