Research

My research interests lie mostly in moral psychology, ethics, and metaethics. However, I like to think about these topics with others, including thinkers that are part of the history of philosophy and, especially, Kant. I am currently working on a project on loneliness. You can listen to me talk about my different research projects here.

Loneliness:

I believe that we are lonely when we take ourselves to be alone in the exercise of our agency, or, as I put it, when we stand alone on the abyss that sets the noumenal self apart from the empirical world. This is the account of loneliness I defend in a paper forthcoming in Ergo. Building on this view, I am now thinking about how to escape the ‘prison of the self’ and what conditions – political, interpersonal, and intrapersonal – must be in place for us to be able to do so. 

Kant:

In my PhD, I looked into how Kant’s notion of the ‘unity of will’ can shed light on many morally relevant ways in which we relate to one another. I worked on four different papers. The first one looks at Kant’s ‘legal’ worries about sexual interactions and how the ‘unity of will’ is meant to help overcome them. The second paper discusses loneliness, and what we can learn from Kant about it. The third one suggests that Kant might have a more relational conception of autonomy than commonly supposed. And, the fourth one defends the view that, far from the cold rationalism attributed to it, Kant’s is a morality of love. 

Value:

I am interested in the nature of ‘final value’ and what sorts of things can be valuable ‘for their own sake’.  In this area, I have recently published a paper in Philosophical Studies arguing that the debate on final value, with Moorean intrinsicalists on one side and Korsgaardean conditionalists on the other, should be re-cast using more fine-grained relations of metaphysical dependence. Apart from this project, I have also been thinking about what might be special about intrinsic value, as G.E. Moore understood it.