Georgetown University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2008
Mobile, Alabama, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics
Normative Ethics
  •  155
    It is widely accepted that morality does not demand that we do our very best, but our most significant moral traditions do not easily accommodate this intuition. I will argue that the underlying problem is not specific to any particular tradition. Rather, it will be difficult for any moral theory to account for binary moral concepts like permissible/impermissible while also accounting for scalar moral concepts like better/worse. If only the best is considered permissible, morality will seem eith…Read more
  •  54
    Beyond Obligation: Reasons and Supererogation
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77 49-65. 2015.
    I argue that supererogation poses a serious problem for theories of moral reasoning and that this problem results, at least in part, from our taking too narrow a view of the reasons that can influence an act’s deontic status. We tend to focus primarily on those reasons that count directly for and against an act’s performance. To adequately account for supererogation, we need to consider also a different class of moral reasons. Aside from those reasons that contribute, for instance, to an act’…Read more