I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am co-director of the PsyPhi Lab.
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.
My new book The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts (Oxford University Press) defends 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 – how they are “fruitful” for this purpose. The book expands on prior work and presents case studies in empirical research that bear on fruitfulness considerations.
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 relationship between aesthetic pursuits and the true self, 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 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.
When I’m not working on philosophy, I like to play music, walk in nature, read literature, and spend time with my family.