My research sits at the intersection of ethics, practical reason, moral psychology, and action theory. A central aim of mine is to develop an account of certain fundamental features of rational agency, where rational agency is understood to encompass the kinds of capacities that are of interest and concern to moral philosophers. Much of my work, for example, explores the relationship between our reflective, deliberative capacities to respond to reasons, on the one hand, and the myriad ways that we respond to reasons unreflectively and non-deliberatively on the other. At stake here is the question of how these two sets of capacities interact to constitute the kind of autonomy required to be rational agents who are answerable for their actions and attitudes, where answerability is a notion similar to but importantly distinct from the notion of moral responsibility. Central to this research project is an explication of the notion of normative avowal. A normative avowal, on my view, is a kind of speech-act by which a person commits herself to a normative position. I argue that the ability to avow one’s reasons captures the way in which an agent takes a distinctively active role in her own rationality, such that she is answerable to rational appraisals of her actions and attitudes.

More recently, I have turned to issues in applied ethics--including bioethics, engineering ethics, and ethics of AI--again exploring their relationship to features of rational agency and moral psychology. For example, I have recent papers or papers in progress addressing the scope of moral distress, the role of hope in altruistic motivations to participate in therapeutic trials, the deliberative perspective in engineering ethics education, and relationship between behavioral-data-capturing machine learning programs and the reflective agency of the individuals whose digital behavior they capture.

You can find some of my published work here.