My research focuses on questions in and about ethics. My recent work can be roughly divided into four strands:

1. The nature of ethical and more broadly normative thought and talk, e.g.:

• What, if anything distinguishes authoritative normativity (perhaps possessed by morality or prudence), from the sort of normativity possessed by etiquette or the rules of chess?
• What are the most attractive metasemantic options for normative realists?
• How should expressivists seek to explain what is distinctive of moral judgments?

2. Questions about the metaphysics of ethics, e.g.:

• Is a metaphysical explanation of practical normativity possible, and if so, what would it look like?
• What is the significance of the supervenience of the ethical for the metaphysics of the normative?
• How can we best understand what reductionism, non-reductive monism, and dualism about the ethical involve? Is non-reductive naturalism about ethics as attractive of a view in ethics as it appears to be in the philosophy of mind?

3. Questions in practical ethics, e.g.:

• What is the nature of our moral obligations to non-human animals?
• Does the revisionary nature of ethical veganism undermine the force of philosophical arguments for this view?
• How strong are 'Moorean' arguments in defense of commonsensical views in areas of applied ethics like animal ethics?
• Many of us are 'moral radicals' about one or another topic: we think that widely accepted and enforced moral norms in our own communities are deeply wrong. How should the moral radical respond to the perceived moral vices of her community?
• What is the structure of the normative explanation of the norms that govern our interactions with institutions that systematically bring about bad consequences, such as factory farms or the global political and economic framework that promotes global warming?

4. The methodology of practical ethics and metaethics, e.g.:

• How can we best proceed in constructing and justifying systematic ethical theories?
• Are there ethical 'Moorean facts' that can serve as fixed points in our ethical thinking and theorizing?
• Does the revisionary nature of ethical veganism undermine the force of philosophical arguments for this view?
• What is the significance of work in the metaphysics, semantics, and psychology of ethics for ethical theorizing?
• How should we understand the potential significance of empirical research and of intuition for justifying ethical claims and theories?
• What, if anything, does Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium teach us about the methodology of normative ethics?
• Does an appropriate respect for the 'autonomy' of ethics undermine the project of metaphysical theorizing about ethics?
• Can one be a normative realist without taking on metaphysical commitments?
• What are the burdens and benefits of the 'quasi-realist turn' in metaethical expressivism?
• Should expressivists resist or embrace the current fashion of extending expressivism from its traditional home as an account of moral speech-acts to become an account of broadly normative or even semantic speech acts?
• What is the significance for our ethical thinking and theorizing of the fact that we can theorize about a wide variety of actual normative concepts, and a still wider variety of possible ones?

I am also deeply interested in questions in metaphysics, epistemology, metaphilosophy and the philosophy of science that intersect with the above interests. Finally, I am interested in a variety of structural questions in normative ethics and political philosophy.