•  960
    Epicureanism and Skepticism about Practical Reason
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2): 195-208. 2020.
    Epicureans believe that death cannot harm the one who dies because they hold the existence condition, which states that a subject is able to be harmed only while they exist. I show that on one reading of this condition death can, in fact, make the deceased worse off because it is satisfied by the deprivation account of death’s badness. I argue that the most plausible Epicurean view holds the antimodal existence condition, according to which no merely possible state of affairs can be good or bad …Read more
  •  766
    Permanent Value
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2): 356-372. 2022.
    Temporal nihilism is the view that our lives won’t matter after we die. According to the standard interpretation, this is because our lives won’t make a permanent difference. Many who consider the view thus reject it by denying that our lives need to have an eternal impact. However, in this paper, I develop a different formulation of temporal nihilism revolving around the persistence of personal value itself. According to this stronger version, we do not have personal value after death, so our p…Read more
  •  533
    Possible Intentions and the Doctrine of Double Effect
    Ethics, Medicine and Public Health 8 11-17. 2019.
    Under the standard formulation of the Doctrine of Double Effect, an act is permissible only if it is the result of an intention to do good and not the result of an intention to do bad. Many find that this absurdly ties the act’s permissibility to the agent’s character and not to features of the act itself. In light of such criticism, some philosophers have reformulated the doctrine so that it holds that an act is permissible given that it results from an intention to do good by some agent. I arg…Read more
  •  529
    Structuring Wellbeing
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 564-580. 2022.
    Many questions about wellbeing involve metaphysical dependence. Does wellbeing depend on minds? Is wellbeing determined by distinct sorts of things? Is it determined differently for different subjects? However, we should distinguish two axes of dependence. First, there are the grounds that generate value. Second, there are the connections between the grounds and value which make it so that those grounds generate that value. Given these distinct axes of dependence, there are distinct dimensions t…Read more
  •  510
    Artifactual Normativity
    Synthese 200 (126): 1-19. 2022.
    A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special sort of artifact, where artifacts…Read more
  •  354
    Value After Death
    Ratio 35 (3): 194-203. 2022.
    Does our life have value for us after we die? Despite the importance of such a question, many would find it absurd, even incoherent. Once we are dead, the thought goes, we are no longer around to have any wellbeing at all. However, in this paper I argue that this common thought is mistaken. In order to make sense of some of our most central normative thoughts and practices, we must hold that a person can have wellbeing after they die. I provide two arguments for this claim on the basis of postmo…Read more
  •  295
    Review of Dale Dorsey's A Theory of Prudence (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (3): 303-306. 2022.
  •  274
    Against Instantiation
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    According to traditional universalism, properties are instantiated by objects, where instantiation is a ‘tie’ that binds objects and properties into facts. I offer two arguments against this view. I then develop an alternative higher-order account which holds that properties are primitively predicated of objects yet, unlike traditional nominalism, are nevertheless genuinely real. When it’s a fact that Fo, it’s not because object o instantiates F-ness, but just that Fo – where F still exists. Aga…Read more
  •  259
    Janus-Faced Grounding
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    A common view in the metaphysics of ground is that all grounding facts are grounded. This generates an infinite regress of ever more grounding of grounding facts, but most grounding theorists take the regress to be harmless. However, in this paper, I argue that the regress is in fact vicious, therefore some grounding facts are ungrounded. Since the regress appears to fall out of two plausible principles of fundamentality, I offer a new interpretation of them that allows for ungrounded grounding …Read more
  •  231
    Joints and Basic Ways
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Metaphysicians often distinguish between joints and basic ways. Joints are the unified and joint-carving properties that trace the structure of the world. They are theorized under the ideology of structural, perfectly natural, or sparse properties. Basic ways are the ultimate and independent properties that give rise to all others. They are theorized under the ideology of grounding, where the ungrounded properties are the basic ways. While these notions are often seen as rivals, I argue that we …Read more
  •  218
    Aggregating Personal Value
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics. forthcoming.
    A person possesses value from various components of wellbeing, but they also have overall wellbeing from various instances of value taken together. Most ethicists assume that there is an objectively unique way that wellbeing from components aggregates into overall wellbeing. However, I argue that aggregation is subjective and varies depending on what sort of aggregation a person values. I end with some implications for the significance of death.
  •  209
    Unbunking Arguments: A Case Study in Metaphysics and Cognitive Science
    In Alvin Goldman & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Metaphysics and Cognitive Science, . pp. 384-402. 2019.
    This chapter develops a style of argument that realists can use to defend the methodological propriety of appealing to a given range of intuitions. Unbunking arguments are an epistemically positive analogue of debunking arguments, and they revolve around the claim that the processes dominantly responsible for beliefs about a given domain are reliable. However, processes cannot always be assessed for accuracy with respect to the relevant domain, so this chapter also develops the cross-domain stra…Read more