Research

Incommensurability and Incompleteness

Most of my published research focuses on a cluster of issues around incomplete preferences, unsharp or imprecise credences, and value incommensurability. In one sense of the word, two items are incommensurate if neither is better but they are also not precisely equally good. I’ve written a short introduction to incommensurability on its PhilPapers page.

Nihilism and Internalism

In more straightforwardly metaethical terrain, am interested in Global Normative Nihilism, moral error theory’s more aggressive sibling. Not only categorical/external but also hypothetical/internal reasons claims are false. I argue that this view avoids (or embraces) ‘companions in guilt’ responses to queerness arguments for the moral error theory, and that it offers radical conceptual as well as metaphysical simplicity. It is a depressing (nihilistic!) view, but I argue that it won’t lead to a complete loss of motivation or subjective concern, as some have argued.

Practical Ethics

Despite nihilistic tendencies, I have lately also become more interested in questions in normative or practical ethics, especially about the environment.