My philosophical interests are in ethics and moral psychology, with a primary focus on Kant’s ethics. My work on Kant’s ethics can be divided into two broad projects. The first aims to defend the view that Kant’s ethics includes significant duties to cultivate moral feelings, such as love and sympathy. In a recent paper (“Active Sympathetic Participation”), I argue that Kant’s third duty of love (die Pflicht der Teilnehmung) commands agents to cultivate the requisite sympathetic feelings necessary to participate affectively in the lives of others.

I am also generally interested in the intersection between happiness and morality. I have long been intrigued by Kant’s decision to frame obligations of beneficence in terms of a duty to promote the happiness, not merely the welfare, of others. This has led me to explore the role and status of happiness and its pursuit in Kant’s ethical theory. At the moment, I am particularly interested in what Kant did not have to say on the subject of promoting others’ happiness, namely, he does not specify that we ought to promote others’ happiness in accordance with their virtue (or even their perceived virtue). My recent work on the scope of Kantian beneficence has brought to light questions concerning the relationship between the pursuit of one’s own happiness, moral development, and proper self-regard. I am presently engaged with some of these questions.

In addition to my work in Kantian ethics, I also have teaching and research interests in bioethics, especially with regard to issues concerning procreation. I am currently working on a paper entitled “Selecting for Disability: What the Case of Selecting for Deafness Can Tell Us about Procreative Selection in General.” This paper examines several recent attempts to explicate the supposed moral wrongness of deliberately selecting for a deaf child.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:
“Widening the Field for the Practice of Virtue: Kant’s Wide Imperfect Duties,” Proceedings from 10th International Kant Congress (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, September 2008)
“Active Sympathetic Participation: Reconsidering Kant’s Duty of Sympathy,” Kantian Review (forthcoming 2009)
“Beneficence and Other Duties of Love in The Metaphysics of Morals,” co-authored with Marcia Baron, in Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics ed. Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming)