I write about what it means to value as finite humans: how particular relationships shape our valuing, and what makes human relations and attitudes good.
What is it to love well? What makes love an appropriate response to a person? In my dissertation, The Work of Love, I argue that love is made appropriate by what makes it go well—a relationship of mutual attunement. This theory, the oikeiotic account, supports a broad claim: the goodness of how we are related to one another and to the world is more fundamental than appreciating things for their inherent value. The dissertation thus moves from interpersonal love to a relationship-centered approach to the assessment of human valuing.
In an accompanying project, I advance a theory of respect: I argue that respect is a virtue, and as such a constitutive ideal of social interaction. I then use this account to solve long-standing problems about the moral evaluation of motivation and emotions.
Another project tackles the secular Euthyphro question: Is what matters created or found by us? I argue that the answer must explain why what matters isn’t arbitrary—why there are reasons to care about something rather than nothing. I am developing a “relationalism” suited to the explanatory task. As I argue, the importance of things consists at bottom in facts about their harmony or congruence with what we care about, rather than their being constructed therefrom. What matters is objective and dependent on human minds and histories. Is this view naturalist? That turns on closer attention to different dependency relations between humans and the normative facts.
Finally, I am working on the role of contingency and history in practical reasoning. I argue:
That conviction in our deepest attachments can resist genealogical debunking arguments.
That it is unfitting to respond to loss by thinking, “I wish that lost good never existed.”
That al-Ghazali’s solution to a puzzle about moral understanding and arbitrary religious norms casts light on a novel contingentist moral explanation.