University of Pennsylvania
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2010
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America
  •  33
    The Structural Competence of Contractualism
    Journal of Value Inquiry 48 (3): 437-447. 2014.
    Contractualists characterize morality as fundamentally concerning how people relate to one another. Insofar as someone treats others in a way that they can accept, her actions are permissible. If someone’s actions cannot be justified to others, she acts wrongly. By relying on this idea of justifiability to others, contractualists can account for the wrongness of acts by appealing to a wide variety of reasons. For instance, contractualists can explain why murder is wrong by appealing to the death…Read more
  •  36
    Equality, Capability and Neurodiversity
    In C. D. Herrera Alexandra Perry (ed.), Ethics and Neurodiversity, Cambridge Scholars University. pp. 39-51. 2013.
    The traditional paradigm of equality combines a focus on the goals of democratic institutions with the equality of resources position. The goal of distributive justice in this picture is to put citizens on equal footing in mutually accountable relationships by ensuring each has access to the kinds of things that serve as all-purpose means for pursuing their interests, like money. This approach, with its overt focus on providing citizens all-purpose means, however, pays insufficient attention to …Read more
  •  79
    Francis Hutcheson: Why Be Moral?
    Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (2): 149-159. 2011.
    Like all theories that account for moral motivation, Francis Hutcheson's moral sense theory faces two related challenges. The skeptical challenge calls into question what reasons an agent has to be moral at all. The priority challenge asks why an agent's reasons to be moral tend to outweigh her non-moral reasons to act. I argue a defender of Hutcheson can respond to these challenges by building on unique features of his account. She can respond to skeptical challenge by drawing a direct parallel…Read more
  •  188
    In The Second Person Standpoint, Darwall charges that all value-oriented foundations for ethics make a category mistake. Calling it Strawson’s point, he argues these foundations explain moral authority, which concerns whether someone has standing to hold another accountable, in terms of a value, which essentially concerns what makes the world go best. However, whether it would be good for me to blame you simply asks a different question than whether I have standing to blame you. I defend a value…Read more