Clemson, South Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind
Meta-Ethics
  •  175
    The Land Ethic, Moral Development, and Ecological Rationality
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (1): 149-175. 2007.
    There has been significant debate over both the imiplications and the merit of Leopold's land ethic. I consider the two most prominent objections and a resolution to them. One of these objections is that, far from being an alternative to an “economic” or cost‐benefit perspective on environmental issues, Leopold's land ethic merely broadens the range of economic considerations to be used in addressing such issues. The other objection is that the land ethic is a form of “environmental fascism” bec…Read more
  •  117
    Emotion and Full Understanding
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (4): 425-454. 2008.
    Aristotle has famously made the claim that having the right emotion at the right time is an essential part of moral virtue. Why might this be the case? I consider five possible relations between emotion and virtue and argue that an adequate answer to this question involves the epistemic status of emotion, that is, whether the perceptual awareness and hence the understanding of the object of emotion is like or unlike the perceptual awareness of an unemotional awareness of the same object. If an e…Read more
  •  73
    On the Category of Moral Perception
    Social Theory and Practice 32 (1): 75-96. 2006.
  •  52
    Meaning and Affect
    The Pluralist 1 (2). 2006.
    Many theories of meaning hold that meaning is found in some sort of subjective state. However, subjective accounts of meaning have not engaged in a systematic analysis of the subjective state or presented a sustained argument for why meaning is found in that particular state and not some other type of subjective state. This paper argues that emotions play a fundamental role in the meaningfulness of activities in our lives. It contends that emotions are essential to meaning because they are co…Read more
  •  35
    One of the most significant developments in the area of emotion theory in recent years is the revival of the psychoevolutionary approach to classification. This essay appraises the prospects for such an approach. The first contention is that the supposed advantages of psychoevolutionary classification over functional classification in scientific psychological research is less than presumed , particularly with respect to the utility of the classification , which is the basis of the argument for t…Read more
  •  23
    Perceptual Emotions and Emotional Virtue
    Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 3 (1): 10-15. 2021.
    In this essay I focus on two areas discussed in Michael Brady’s Emotion: The Basics, namely perceptual models of emotion and the relation between emotion and virtue. Brady raises two concerns about perceptual theories: that they arguably collapse into feeling or cognitive theories of emotion; and that the analogy between emotion and perception is questionable at best, and is thus not an adequate way of characterizing emotion. I argue that a close look at perception and emotional experience revea…Read more
  •  21
    Virtue and mentation
    Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (1): 83-87. 2006.
  • Emotion, Moral Perception, and Character
    Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison. 2001.
    This dissertation challenges the common belief that the value of emotions, if any, lies chiefly in their ability to motivate. It argues that emotions are vital to being able to properly evaluate what one encounters in the world. The dissertation focuses on moral evaluation, examining the role of emotion in determining moral character by way of the effect of emotion on moral perception. The term "moral perception" refers to an evaluative apprehension or "taking in" of a situation, where this appr…Read more