I work at the intersection of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.
Authority
My dissertation The Moral Fabric examines how it is possible for communities, especially political communities, to change the moral duties of those within them. (In fact, I think this is what distinctive of political authority.) This leads to a number of questions, including:
- Is political authority a relation between an authority and a single subject, or a necessarily plural relation between an authority and all of its subjects?
- To what extent are disputes over authority actually disputes over the nature of moral duties?
- In which ways does disobedience of authority undermine that authority?
Privacy
I think that privacy is one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century, yet it is enormously undertheorized, especially by analytic moral philosophers. I have been focusing on the relationship between liberalism, democracy and privacy. Is some measure of privacy intrinsically necessary for a liberal society, or can it be treated like any other good that is contingent on the desires of citizens? In other words, to what extent is a liberal society free to enact any popular position on privacy?
Other Projects
Aside from authority and privacy, I'm interested in metaethics, and have done some work on moral naturalism and some of the semantic arguments (G.E. Moore's Open Question Argument, and Horgan and Timmons' Moral Twin Earth Argument) that have been offered against it. I'm also interested in presupposition and conversational implicature, and have an ongoing project exploring how belief revision and logics associated with belief revision might be used to model them.