I lived the first nine years of my life on a small farm in western Québec, where I indulged a taste for unwashed vegetables and the mythology and history of ancient Greece. Homeschooled until I was twelve, I made the transition to high school in Victoria, B.C., where I misspent my youth playing way too much chess. I moved to Vancouver to go to Simon Fraser University, but stopped halfway through my BA to work for a land surveyor, establishing property lines and locating buildings all over the Lower Mainland. I became a vegetarian at this time, after reflecting on the experience of clubbing to death a fish I had just caught. I decided that if that didn't feel right, hamburgers were an uncomfortable meal indeed. While living in Vancouver I also developed tastes for the martial art aikido and for karaoke: respectively the sublime and the ridiculous of Japanese cultural exports.

I caught the philosophy bug while working as a surveyor. I happened to pick up Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope at my local library, and rediscovered the debate between 'Realists' and 'Anti-realists' about just about everything. Intrigued, I started reading Plato, the Ur-Villain of Rorty's story. This led me back to Simon Fraser, and an undergraduate major in philosophy, where I became deeply interested in Kant's attempt to resolve this debate, and in metaethics, where philosophers argue over whether the norms that we live by should get a realist or an anti-realist interpretation.

My appetite whetted, I shipped out to New Jersey, to study philosophy at Princeton. I spent five happy years around 1879 Hall, living a variant of the good life: making friends, falling very much in love with Amy Shuster, and starting the process of weaving our lives together, developing views, having them refuted by my friends, and trying again. I became a near-vegan while at Princeton (I still eat honey) after a wonderful talk by Liz Harman made me think harder about the way that the suffering of animals bears on the food choices that it is reasonable to make.

At Princeton, I started thinking about the way that the realism-antirealism debates that animate metaethics might bear on philosophers' attempts to justify systematic theories about what we ought to do. Guided by a wonderful group of colleagues and mentors (most centrally Michael Smith and Tom Kelly), I shaped these thoughts into a dissertation and entered professional philosophy.

After Princeton, Amy and I moved to the University of Minnesota Duluth. There, at the Western tip of Lake Superior, I spent three years puzzling over philosophical questions about ethics, and learning the joys of each of the concentric philosophical communities that welcomed me. I also edged ever closer to full-fledged foodie obsession. During this time, I started working systematically on how to understand the most promising approaches to normative metaphysics and normative thought from both realist and anti-realist perspectives.

In the Summer of 2011, we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia to join the faculty of Virginia Tech. Here I continued my quest to better understand the most fundamental facts about ethics, consoled in the face of the difficulty of this task by the joys of friendly colleagues, enthusiastic students, a cornucopia of local food, and beautiful hikes.

In December 2011, Everything Changed, with the arrival of our child Finn. It has been simultaneously exhausting and an extraordinary privilege to share my life and love with this truly extraordinary developing person.

Amy, Finn, and I started the latest chapter of our lives in the Summer of 2015, when we moved to Columbus Ohio, where I joined the Department of Philosophy at Ohio State. Here, my philosophical interests are continually being drawn in exciting new directions thanks to my fantastic colleagues and students. I am also blessed with an incomparable riverside bike trail commute, and a fantastic local community to share my new obsession with the board game go.