West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America
  •  36
    Defending Virtue against the Situationist Challenge
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 88 245-258. 2014.
    My essay addresses the situationist critique of virtue ethics. I defend a rarity of virtue response to this critique, but blunt its tip by developing an account of degrees of virtue. On this account, full virtue will indeed be a statistical rarity, but lesser degrees of virtue more common. I argue for this degreed conception of virtue both on historical and systematic grounds: historically, I show that Aristotle and especially Aquinas thought of virtue as being the sort of property that admits o…Read more
  •  27
    Thomas Aquinas on Natural Inclinations and the Practical Cognition of Human Goods
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2): 239-271. 2020.
    Thomas Aquinas’s thought on how human natural inclinations relate to the cognition of basic human goods has been and continues to be highly disputed. Pointing out the weaknesses of both old and new natural law interpretations, I offer an interpretation that is highly sensitive to Aquinas’s language in key texts on this issue and in addition draws upon texts where Aquinas explicates the relationship between inclination and selective attention. I argue that the natural inclinations primarily play …Read more
  •  17
    Rationality and Human Value
    Faith and Philosophy 32 (4): 404-422. 2015.