Publications & Works in Progress

"Against Heaven and Against You: The Puzzle of Promising on Divine Command Theory"

Faith & Philosophy (Oct 2026)

Here, I respond to R. Jay Wallace’s claim that divine command theory cannot allow for directed duties to other humans (i.e., actions we owe to specific persons whom we can wrong by not performing the action). If moral obligations are grounded in God’s commands, we only owe actions to God and can wrong God. This goes for the paradigm example of directed duties: promising. I formulate an account of promising as a directed duty on divine command theory. I explore why duties are plausibly directed to God and argue similar considerations hold for the promisee’s relationship to the promisor. I briefly extend this account to other directed duties such as duties between governments and their citizens.

"Fallible Intuition and the Problem of Meta-Coherence" (Revise and Re-Submit, Synthese)

In this paper, I motivate the idea that intuitions cannot be wrong by exploring a worry for those who hold that intuitions can be wrong. Namely, if intuitions can be wrong, then intuitions would make things rational that seem clearly irrational. For one, contemporary intuitionists should grant that possible subjects could have intuitions about any necessary falsehood. It is hard to see why subjects could have intuitions about some necessary falsehoods but not others. But this will allow for extreme cases of akrasia to be rational. In these cases, one believes that a proposition p is true, though they also believe that their evidence does not support that p is true. These subjects seem irrational, but the contemporary view is plausibly committed to the beliefs involved being rational if the subjects have intuitions that justify their beliefs. So, if we continue to hold that intuitions make false beliefs rational, it is doubtful that intuition immediately justifies beliefs.

"The Access Challenge to Intuitive Knowledge"

In this paper, I argue that we often fail to have good access to the content of our intuitions and as such, we often fail to form beliefs with the same content as our intuitions. In many cases, we regularly think we intuit that some proposition p is true when we really intuit something else (e.g., that a different proposition q is true). For one, there are common cases where we are clearly ignorant of the content of our intuitions. But most importantly, I argue that empirical psychology and observations from general philosophical practice strongly suggest that we are frequently wrong about the exact content of intuitions. The upshot is that even when intuitions justify beliefs, we often fail to have intuitive knowledge. This could lead to a skepticism about intuitive knowledge. However, I lay the groundwork for future research here by arguing that when intuitions have simple, uncontroversial content, their content can be highly clear to us. It is only when our intuitions concern complex and controversial subject matters that we can easily form the wrong beliefs. In these cases, to clarify our intuitions we need to be challenged by others to see where our intuitions actually lie.

"Leibniz’s Modal Collapse Argument Against Divine Simplicity" with Dylan Flint

Strong accounts of divine simplicity (DDS) hold that God is identical to each of God’s attributes, and thus, God’s attributes are identical to one another. A familiar objection to DDS is that it entails modal collapse: since dds implies that God is identical to the divine act of creation, creation exists necessarily rather than contingently. Contemporary versions of modal collapse arguments have only assumed that DDS would necessitate the existence of a particular world. In this paper, we develop Leibniz’s version of the modal collapse argument in which DDS entails not merely that our world necessarily exists, but also that every logically possible world necessarily exists. Leibniz’s key insight is that if God’s intellect and will are identical, which DDS is arguably committed to, then whatever God conceives must also be willed and therefore actualized. Otherwise, something would be true of the divine intellect that is not true of the divine will, which would contradict DDS. We argue that this Leibnizian version of modal collapse has two distinctive implications. First, it highlights that defenders of DDS are rationally committed to a form of theistic modal realism according to which all possible worlds exist, and this raises new theological concerns. Second, certain recent responses to modal collapse arguments do not address the Leibnizian formulation. 

Paper on Intuition and Disagreement