I write about what it means to value as finite humans, and I am particularly interested in what makes human relationships and valuing attitudes good or bad, appropriate or baseless.

What is it to love well? What justifies loving a given person? In my dissertation, The Work of Love, I argue that love is justified by its going well—and that to love someone well is to be mutually attuned to them. This account supports a more general claim: as I argue, the goodness of how we actually relate to one another and to other things is more fundamental than responding to values that subsist in the world. Thus, the dissertation moves from an account of the evaluation of interpersonal love to a broader relational approach to human valuing.

In an accompanying project, I advance a theory of moral attitudes: I argue respect and solidarity are ideals, and constitutive standards for social interaction. I then use this account to solve long standing problems about the moral evaluation of motivation and emotion.

Another project develops constraints for solving the Euthyphro question, in secular guise: Is what matters created or found by us? I argue the answer must explain why what matters isn’t arbitrary—why there are reasons to care about something rather than nothing—and must posit a mutual dependency between what matters and the human need to feel valued.

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

Our attachments to human practices of partiality can resist genealogical debunking.
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 norms casts light on a distinct contingentist form of moral explanation.