I am a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan.
My research focuses on what makes normative judgments correct, what ethics has to do with reasons for action, and how we can come to know the right answers to normative questions.
One line of my research defends analyses of ethical facts in terms of facts about the rationality of motivationally laden attitudes and seeks to explain the connection between ethics and reasons for action in terms of that between rational motives and rational acts.
Another line of my research develops and defends an analysis of judgments about reasons for attitudes and actions, which I call 'Norm Descriptivism'. According to this analysis, to judge that an agent has reason to respond in a certain way is to judge that the response is prescribed by the most fundamental norms she accepts.
Related topics on which I am currenlty working include how my account of ethics and reasons may undermine the basic theoretical motivation for consequentialism, the evidential status of various kinds of normative intuitions, the intentionality of states of norm acceptance, and the ethics of inflicting harms, including the most plauisible formulation of the Doctrine of Double Effect.