I’m a philosopher at the University of Reading. Before joining Reading in 2014, I finished my PhD in Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. Before that I did my BA in Maths & Philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. I grew up in Llanelli, a coastal town in South Wales, and I’m married to the poet Katie Meehan.

I’m Deputy Treasurer of the Mind Association and ‘Cybersmith’ (website manager) of the British Society for Ethical Theory.

Upcoming presentations

• TBC at the Human Extinction Workshop in Southampton, 18 September 2024.
• ‘Moral Supremacy and Blame’ at the APA Eastern in New York, January 2025.

Research

My research and teaching are mostly in metaethics, normative ethics, and some related areas.

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.

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 resons 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.

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