Writing

Normative ethics, especially virtue theory, drew me to philosophy. Since graduate school my active research has tended in the direction of methods in practical ethics and questions at the intersection of philosophy of disability and theories of well-being. I also write short stories when time allows. The moral theory questions I've moved to the academic back burner sometimes show up there.

Academic Publications

"Barbarous Spectacle and General Massacre: A Defense of Gory Fictions." Journal of Applied Philosophy 37, no. 4 (2020): 511-527. [ doi | pre-print ]

Many people suspect it is morally wrong to watch the graphically violent horror films colloquially known as gorefests. A prominent argument vindicating this suspicion is the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA). The ARA holds that we have a duty to maintain a well-functioning moral psychology, and watching gorefests violates that duty by threatening damage to our appropriate reactive attitudes. But I argue that the ARA is probably unsound. Depictions of suffering and death in other genres typically do no damage to our appropriate reactive attitudes, and until we locate a relevant difference between these depictions in gorefests and in other genres, we should assume that the depictions in gorefests do no damage. I consider and reject three candidate differences: in artistic merit, meaningfulness, and audience orientation. Until genre skeptics identify a relevant difference, we should accept the taste for gory fictions as we would any other morally innocuous variation in taste.

I contributed a guest post on the ethics of horror movies to Justice Everywhere, a blog focused on practical ethics and public affairs.

"Stable Strategies for Personal Development: On the Prudential Value of Radical Enhancement and the Philosophical Value of Speculative Fiction." Metaphilosophy 51, no. 1 (2020): 128-150. [ doi | pre-print ]

In her short story "Stable Strategies for Middle Management," Eileen Gunn imagines a future in which Margaret, an office worker, seeks radical genetic enhancements intended to help her secure the middle-management job she wants. One source of the story's tension and dark humor is dramatic irony: readers can see that the enhancements Margaret buys stand little chance of making her life go better for her; enhancing is, for Margaret, probably a prudential mistake. In Section 1 I argue that our positions in the real world are sufficiently similar to Margaret's position in Gunn's fictional world that we should take this story seriously as grounding an argument from analogy for the conclusion that radical genetic enhancements are, for us, probably a prudential mistake. In Section 2 I defend this method. When the question at hand is one of speculative ethics, there is no method better fit to the purpose than argument from analogy to speculative fiction.

"Humans Should Not Colonize Mars." Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3, no. 3 (2017): 334-353. [ doi | pre-print ]

This article offers two arguments for the conclusion that we should refuse, on moral grounds, to establish a human presence on the surface of Mars. The first argument appeals to a principle constraining the use of invasive or destructive scientific techniques. The second appeals to a principle governing appropriate human behavior in wilderness. These arguments are prefaced by two preliminary sections. The first preliminary section argues that authors working in space ethics have good reason to shift their focus away from theory-based arguments in favor of arguments that develop in terms of pre-theoretic principles and beliefs. The second argues that, of the popular justifications for sending humans to Mars, the justification of scientific curiosity alone survives reflective scrutiny.

The BBC World Service's In the Balance produced an episode on the ethics and economics of Mars colonization. I was privileged to participate along with Dr. David Parker (director of human and robotic exploration for ESA) and Bas Lansdorp (founder and CEO of Mars One). Our discussion touches on some of the content of "Humans Should Not Colonize Mars."

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Astrobiology and Space Science Reviews focuses on Martian biology. I contributed an invited commentary that includes an overview of the principle of scientific conservation, which I introduced in Section 3 of "Humans Should Not Colonize Mars."

"Fanciful Examples," with Jason Swartwood. Metaphilosophy 48, no. 3 (2017): 325-344. [ doi | pre-print ]

This article defends the use of fanciful examples within the method of wide reflective equilibrium. First, it characterizes the general persuasive role of described cases within that method. Second, it suggests three criteria any example must meet in order to succeed in this persuasive role; fancifulness has little or nothing to do with whether an example is able to meet these criteria. Third, it discusses several general objections to fanciful examples and concludes that they are objections to the abuse of described cases; they identify no special problem with fanciful examples.

"Ways to Be Worse Off." Res Philosophica 93, no. 4 (2016): 921-949. [ doi | pre-print ]

Does disability make a person worse off? I argue that the best answer is yes and no, because we can be worse off in two conceptually distinct ways. Disabilities usually make us worse off in one way (typified by facing hassles) but not in the other (typified by facing loneliness). Acknowledging two conceptually distinct ways to be worse off has fundamental implications for philosophical theories of well-being.

"Ways to Be Worse Off" won the 2017 Routledge, Taylor & Francis Prize awarded by the APA to the two best papers published by non-tenure-track faculty in 2016.

Creative Publications

"Eight Lacunae." Typehouse Literary Magazine 6, no. 1 (2019): 107-113. [ publisher | gratis: all rights reserved ]

There's an art to liner notes. The best ones tend to be so dense with in-group references and proper nouns they can be difficult for anyone outside the band's inner circle to unravel... and yet a story somehow emerges, the warmer for its insulating layer. It was Chris Butler's notes for Best of the Waitresses and Byron Coley's for a series of Flesh Eaters reissues that convinced me that liner notes are an underexplored medium for narrative fiction.

I had fun compiling an explanatory mixtape for Typehouse's blog. It includes links to eleven songs referenced in the story's densely proper-nouned opening paragraph. Use it to fend off the boredom (b'dum, b'dum).

"The Egg Collection." Reprinted in Midwestern Gothic (Winter 2018): 253-269. [ publisher | amazon ]

When I moved to St. Paul for graduate school, my parents gave me a membership to the Science Museum of Minnesota. Back then, the museum displayed an early-20th-Century collection of birds' eggs, which I loved and visited a few times a year. Along with hundreds of eggshells from all over the country, the curators included in the display a bird-egg price-guide from 1920. It got me thinking about the different kinds of people who might have been attracted to egg collecting, back in the day, and the different ways they might have valued their collections.

Midwestern Gothic posted a short "Contributor Spotlight" interview with me in May 2018.

"The Egg Collection" first appeared in South Dakota Review 51, no. 3&4 (2015): 55-66.

"The Sort of Thing Everyone Knows." Eclectica 21, no. 1 (2017). [ archived online ]

My family moved to Sacramento from a small town in central Ohio when I was eleven. The immediate and unforeseen effect of the move, for me, was the discovery that I like music. That discovery in turn caused changes to my world-view and character, some of which probably qualify as significant. This personal essay/memoir traces some specific consequences of my youthful mania for Erasure. It also functions as an elliptical characterization of my understanding of the limited but real role philosophical reflection can play in moral development.

"Conflagration" (as D.L.E. Roger). In This Is How You Die, ed. Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki, New York: Grand Central (2013): 131-150. [ amazon | gratis: cc by-nc-nd ]

T. Rex, star of Ryan North's "Dinosaur Comics," once fantasized about writing a story set in a world in which a simple blood test could determine, with perfect accuracy, the future cause of a patient's death. Ryan and some of his colleagues in the web-comic world pursued the idea, editing and publishing an anthology of stories using T. Rex's hook. It was an indie blockbuster, successful enough that they put together a second volume, which includes a story by me. (Visit the Machine of Death website for more information about the history of the anthology and its penumbra of spin-off projects.)

Dissertation

The Reward of Virtue [ archived online ]

Most work in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics begins by supposing that the virtues are the traits of character that make us good people. Secondary questions, then, include whether, why, and in what ways the virtues are good for the people who have them. My dissertation is an argument that the neo-Aristotelian approach is upside down. If, instead, we begin by asking what collection of character traits are good for us-- that is, what collection of traits are most likely to promote our own well-being-- we find a collection of traits a lot like the traditional slate of virtues. This suggests an egoistic theory of the virtues: the virtues just are those traits of character that reliably promote the well-being of their possessor. In addition to making the positive case for character egoism, I defend it from some anticipated objections. Most importantly, I argue that character egoism doesn't inherit the problems of ethical egoism. I conclude by arguing that character egoism can account for two virtues traditionally thought beyond its reach: honesty and justice.

Précis of The Reward of Virtue [ libre: cc by-sa ]

This is the précis I prepared for the open-to-the-public portion of my dissertation defense. It's a 20-minute presentation, intended for a general audience.