I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. I am also appointed (Assistant Professor) in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology training area in the Psychology Department at the Graduate Center.
I work in moral and political philosophy and moral psychology, often at the intersections of these fields. I use traditional and empirical research methods to examine questions about the nature of moral motivation, justice, and other core philosophical topics. I developed a multidimensional account of the ways in which the normative concepts of moral and political philosophy should help us to solve practical problems that inevitably arise in our interactions with one another – the ways in which they are “fruitful” for these purposes. Extending this view and examining case studies in empirical research that bear on the fruitfulness of these concepts is the project of my forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts.
Among other case studies, my research teams conducted the first experiments demonstrating that philosophical arguments can motivate greater charitable giving, and this work is part of a broader conversation about the aims of moral argumentation and normative philosophical theory.
I also have interests in the ways that relationships of identification and closeness between citizens and non-citizens should impact our theorizing about immigration justice and refugee policy, the role that feasibility considerations should play in our theorizing about justice, how results from experimental psychology should impact our theorizing about the social contract and competing conceptions of justice, the moral and causal significance of enabling harm as distinct from doing and allowing harm, the Kantian insight that domestic justice depends on international justice, the relationship between aesthetic and moral value, the role of expressive disrespect in explaining the wrongfulness of discrimination, and the reasons we have for keeping our promises to the dead, and have ongoing research projects on these topics, among others.
I co-direct PsyPhi Lab, a moral psychology lab composed of philosophy and psychology faculty members and graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center, with Ana Gantman.
When I’m not working on philosophy, I like to make music, walk in nature, read literature, and spend time with my family.