Current Research

Below is a brief overview of the kinds of questions I'm thinking and writing about these days. Feel free to email me for more information; I may have drafts available on some of these topics.

Disgust Disgust seems to play a significant role in many moral judgments. But many of these judgments strike us as problematic: disgust is implicated in homophobia, racism, and other prejudices; it also motivates stigma and ostracism. Could disgust have any useful role to play in moral judgments? Are disgust-backed judgments really 'moralizing' non-moral issues? Or is there a place for disgust in the pantheon of moral emotions? In an early paper (2013) I argue against the arguments made by disgust skeptics and claim that we can identify a role for disgust in the moral domain. In more recent work (2018) I elaborate on this idea, and argue that disgust is best conceived as a way we communicate moral judgments to others.

Food What and how we choose to eat is fraught with issues of morality and identity. Why do we rule certain edible items, such as insects, pets, and people, out of bounds? What is it about certain chemical products, like pop rocks and breath mints, that makes them seem like food? Is there any meaningful sense in which we can define what food is, or is it whatever we choose to consume?

Moral Disagreement I'm interested in the implications of moral disagreement for moral realism. A lot depends on the details: what actually explains moral disagreement and moral diversity? To answer this question, I look at empirical research concerning moral diversity, drawing on work in anthropology and psychology.

Philosophical Methodology I'm interested in questions about the role of intuitions in philosophy, and the ways philosophers go about investigating these. For the most part, experimental philosophy has dominated recent discussions of empirically informed philosophy, but historically, philosophers used qualitative as well as quantitative methods of investigation. In a paper currently in progress, I contrast these two approaches as applied to the question of moral and epistemic relativism.

A related interest concerns the norms governing philosophical inquiry. I have a forthcoming paper in which I argue against the idea that philosophers must believe the arguments they publish. Whether or not I believe this view is a different question altogether...