I write about what it means to value as finite humans: I’m interested in what makes human relationships and attachments 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 a relationship’s going well—by attunement to a person. This account supports a general claim: that the goodness of how we relate to one another is more fundamental than responding to inherent value, in the manner it calls for. This dissertation moves then from an account of the evaluation of interpersonal love to the start of an ethic of 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 the good created or found by us? I argue that the answer must explain why what’s appropriate to care about isn’t arbitrary, which—surprisingly—rules out a variety of proposals about what grounds objective value.

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.