research

My work explores ethical and metaethical questions that rise for human valuers vulnerable to time and chance: more specifically, I probe how our contingent bonds and histories shape what to value, and how to value it, and why.

the work of love

To love is to engage with precious sources of value; not to love is to be cut from some of what most matters. Yet it isn’t clear how best to understand this observation, and whether it can be vindicated. This dissertation offers a novel account, sketching a path from the ethics of love to the foundations of value, to why there is such a category as ‘the worth valuing’. Love, I argue, fashions what justifies it: attunement with who, and what, is loved. This view challenges an ancient yet widespread idea that the norm of love is to appreciate what is loved for its intrinsic value. To motivate my alternative, I account for what makes interpersonal love go well and for how beloved projects enrich a life. A hypothesis is put forth: to value anything (not just to love it) is an attempt to be in a relationship that vindicates the valuing itself.

1. One branch of research tests the dissertation’s hypothesis on other ways to value.

[a paper arguing that moral emotions manifest appropriate moral regard for persons, and that such regard just is a way of being in moral community]

[a paper on how trusting in and mourning other people sustain the intergenerational relationships warranting these responses]

2. Another branch takes up metaphysical and epistemic issues raised by the assessment of valuing.

[a paper arguing it is rational to believe attachments are fitting, not because of their origins - typically, unruly - but their becoming unquestionable]

[a paper on the Maria von Herbert argument for absolute value, robust realistically understood]

3. A separate branch interrogates (what I call) the principle of sufficient practical reason: that there are reasons for all reasons to act.

[a paper arguing from the claim that ‘brute wanting’ is never a reason why there is a reason to act to a criticism of foundationalism in ethics]

[a paper reconstructing al-Ghazali’s view that there can be categorical reasons to follow arbitrary social norms]