Peer-Reviewed Papers
“What would the virtuous person eat? The case for virtuous omnivorism" Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics
“The virtue of compassion in compassionate conservation” Conservation Biology (with Benjamin Allen)
"Why appeals to the moral significance of birth are saddled with a dilemma" Journal of Medical Ethics (with Adam Omelianchuk)
"A Critical Examination of the False Hope Harms Argument" Bioethics
"A Dilemma for Appeals to the Moral Significance of Birth" Journal of Medical Ethics (with Adam Omelianchuk)
"Orphans and the Relational Significance of Birth: A Response to Singh" Journal of Medical Ethics
"Revisiting Thomas Hobbes on the Passions" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
"Should we eat the human-pig chimera?" Food Ethics
“The Hopeful Leviathan: Hope, Deliberation, and the Commonwealth” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie
“Aquinas on the emotion of hope: A psychological or theological treatment?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
“Thomas Aquinas on the Virtues of Character and Virtuous Ends” (with Alexander Stöpfgeshoff) Review of Metaphysics
"Revisiting Anselm on Time and Divine Eternity" The Heythrop Journal
"Rethinking Aquinas on the passion of despair" New Blackfriars
“Should Moral Vegetarians Avoid Eating Vegetables?” Food Ethics
“Thomas Aquinas on the Basis of the Irascible-Concupiscible Division,” Res Philosophica
"Varieties of the cruelty-based objection to factory farming" Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics
“Why hope is not a moral virtue: Aquinas’s insight” Ratio
“Repairing humanity's broken watch: Leibniz on original sin” Studia Leibnitiana
“Hope and practical deliberation” Analysis
“Deflating moods,” The Southwest Philosophy Review
“Leibniz on unbaptized infant damnation,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion
“Anti-luck virtue epistemology and divine revelation,” Philosophia
"In defense of virtue-responsibilism," Logos & Episteme
“God, time, and the Kalãm cosmological argument,” Sophia
"The conciliatory view and the charge of wholesale skepticism," Logos & Episteme
Dissertation: Emotion in Action: Hope’s Role in Practical Deliberation
Most philosophers think that when one deliberates about what to do—for example, how to get to work on time—all emotions, including hope, ought to be suppressed in favor of dispassionate reasoning. I argue for a very different position in my dissertation: I argue that hope motivates and sustains practical deliberation, and, hence, that hope has a significant and valuable place in human life. In the first two chapters of the dissertation, I argue that Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Hobbes, two otherwise very different philosophers, agree that the emotion of hope motivates practical deliberation. My goal in these chapters is to recover the different accounts given by Aquinas and Hobbes of exactly what hope is and how it figures in deliberation in order to advance our understanding of the historical significance of the emotion of hope. In the third chapter, I combine the conceptual insights of the preceding historical chapters with present-day psychological research: on the basis of a consideration of the role of hope in the treatment of depression, I argue that hope motivates and sustains practical deliberation—one must hope in order to deliberate about what to do.