Research

"Research?" Non-philosophers often think it's weird when philosophers talk about their "research." It's not like we run experiments or do fieldwork. (Well, some do.) I like to think that philosophers research inferential connections among our various beliefs, and that this is worth doing because these connections change over time as the world and our beliefs about it change.

My current research is mainly in environmental ethics and ethical theory.

My focus in environmental ethics is on ethical issues arising from climate change. At the moment, I'm concentrating on the ethics of geoengineering (also known as "climate engineering"). I coauthored a paper on ethical norms for geoengineering research with Bob Kopp and Michael Oppenheimer. The three of us have another forthcoming paper on the same topic, and we are working on a third.

With respect to ethical theory, I'm particularly interested in questions about the nature of moral intuitions, their role in moral epistemology, and how we might do ethical inquiry without moral intuitions. That's what I wrote my dissertation on.

I'm also interested in normative ethics and other areas of applied ethics (such as economic aspects of the ethics of globalization), empirically-informed moral psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, Confucian ethics, the history of ethics, and the "free will problem."

For more details, including a list of publications and presentations, see my CV.