Welcome! I am a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University specializing in ethics and moral psychology. I am completing my dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Congdon on the philosophy of love.
In my dissertation, "In The Name of Love: Love's Public and Private Reasons," I intervene in the reasons of love debate, which asks whether reasons we have to act with or for our loved ones are moral reasons. While some philosophers argue that love provides us with sui generis reasons that compete with moral reasons, others view reasons of love as a kind of moral reason. Rather than defend one of these camps, I argue that reasons of love are ethical because of love’s relation to human flourishing, while the intimacy and privacy constitutive of love place limits on those reasons’ availability in public moral justification. Therefore, reasons of love do not separate us from morality, but can separate us from our moral community.
In my free time I love hiking with my black lab, Benjen, getting lost in a good book, watching horror films (mostly through my fingers), and--more recently--cuddling with my newborn son.
Questions that keep me up at night...
What is love, and why does it make life so hard?
Much of my research explores the nature of love as a historical human phenomenon. I am interested in the ways in which love as eros can be understood as fundamentally ethical and yet a source of great moral failing.
What role does love play in structuring the ideal physician-patient relationship?
Since Emanuel and Emanuel's seminal piece, bioethicists tend to think of the deliberative model as the ideal model for the physician-patient relationship. Can love play a role in this relation? What does it require that the physician offer up of herself to her patient? How does love and care in this exchange structure the patient and physician's identities?
Can we be friends or romantically involved with artificial agents?
Is it possible to map Aristotle's conception of character friendship onto relationships between human beings and artificial agents, particularly if character friendship entails the formation of a shared identity? What kind of personal identity can we reasonably ascribe to an artifical agent? Is this friendship analogous to interspecies friendship?