I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. I would describe myself as an ethicist with an anti-theoretic streak paradoxically paired with an affection for the grand undertakings of historical figures from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca to Hume, Kant, Mill, Sidgwick, and Nietzsche. More recent favorites include W.D. Ross, William Frankena, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Barbara Herman, Rosalind Hursthouse, Marcia Baron, Julia Annas, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf, among many others.
My current research focuses on the development of a novel framewo…
I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. I would describe myself as an ethicist with an anti-theoretic streak paradoxically paired with an affection for the grand undertakings of historical figures from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca to Hume, Kant, Mill, Sidgwick, and Nietzsche. More recent favorites include W.D. Ross, William Frankena, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Barbara Herman, Rosalind Hursthouse, Marcia Baron, Julia Annas, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf, among many others.
My current research focuses on the development of a novel framework for understanding moral agency. Noting certain puzzles that arise from common neo-Aristotelian conceptions of virtue, vice, continence, and incontinence, I offer new ways to think about the psychology of each of these states and the key differences between them. The resulting scheme serves as an outline for a comprehensive alternative theory of moral agency, one that emphasizes the many psychological subtleties that can make moral agents good, bad, better, and worse.
Other projects include: a Kantian account of prudential reasons to be virtuous; a critique of character-centered ethics' use of the skill model of virtue; and an account of the normative relation(s) between right action and good agency.
