I discovered philosophy in my first semester at Lawrence University when I was required to read Plato's Republic. I earned my PhD in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where my dissertation was directed by Fred Feldman. While in graduate school I spent a year at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. I've taught philosophy at DePauw since the fall of 1999. You can see what some of my students have said about me here.

I hold a robust form of moral realism according to which (i) moral properties are sui generis, not reducible to other kinds of properties and (ii) objective morality requires no foundation external to itself. I explain this view and defend it against various challenges in Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (Oxford 2014). In 2018 I participated in a debate about the foundation of morality with prominent Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. For a quick and easy intro to these ideas, see this.

In recent years I've become increasingly interested in psychology and its connections with philosophy. For example, in a recent paper I argue that the presence of psychopaths in the world presents a serious problem for the divine command theory, and in a chapter for the book Humility I draw on work in positive psychology to develop a secular account of humility.