I am a graduate student in philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill. I work primarily in normative ethics, but am also interested in metaethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion, as well as certain issues in applied ethics -- particularly the moral status of non-human animals.

I am currently finishing my dissertation, titled Focusing Respect on Creatures. In this dissertation, my general project is to identify and attempt to solve a particular problem inherent in any account of respect – namely, that any theoretical grounding of our obligations of respect will, counter-intuitively and problematically, rest in features that creatures possess and not in the creatures themselves. The new analysis of respect for which I argue progresses in two stages: (1) a formal account, according to which respect is owed to the class of creatures that are either suffused with the value of a morally relevant feature, or that are of a kind that normally possesses that feature, and (2) a more substantive argument concerning what the morally relevant feature is. I argue that this feature is not the sort of rationality Kantians identify, but is instead ‘being a subject in the world’, for our attitude of respect is fundamentally a response to this morally considerable quality.