Peer-Reviewed Papers
"A Dilemma for Appeals to the Moral Significance of Birth" (with Adam Omelianchuk) forthcoming Journal of Medical Ethics
"Orphans and the Relational Significance of Birth: A Response to Singh" forthcoming Journal of Medical Ethics
A paper responding to an account of the moral significance of birth.
"Revisiting Thomas Hobbes on the Passions" forthcoming Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
A paper exploring whether Hobbesian passions are cognitive states or not.
"Should we eat the human-pig chimera?" forthcoming Food Ethics
A paper arguing that it is morally permissible to eat the flesh of pigs that have been genetically altered to grow human organs.
“The Hopeful Leviathan: Hope, Deliberation, and the Commonwealth” forthcoming Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie
A paper exploring the role of hope in the founding and sustaining of the Hobbesian commonwealth.
“Aquinas on the emotion of hope: A psychological or theological treatment?” forthcoming American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
A paper exploring Aquinas's rationale for limiting the emotion of hope to arduous future possible goods.
“Thomas Aquinas on the Virtues of Character and Virtuous Ends” (with Alexander Stöpfgeshoff) forthcoming Review of Metaphysics
A paper exploring how virtues provide the ends of practical deliberations.
"Revisiting Anselm on Time and Divine Eternity" forthcoming The Heythrop Journal
A paper that examines Anselm's aims in discussing time and eternity.
"Rethinking Aquinas on the passion of despair" forthcoming New Blackfriars
A paper that explores Aquinas's account of despair in light of recent criticism.
“Should Moral Vegetarians Avoid Eating Vegetables?” Food Ethics 5 (2020): 1-15
A paper that extends an argument against the moral permissibility of eating meat to the moral permissibility of eating vegetables.
“Thomas Aquinas on the Basis of the Irascible-Concupiscible Division,” Res Philosophica 97 (2020): 31-52
A paper that offers a new interpretation of what grounds Aquinas's division of the sensory appetite.
"Varieties of the cruelty-based objection to factory farming" Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 (2019): 377-390
A paper that responds to a recent defense of factory farming.
“Why hope is not a moral virtue: Aquinas’s insight” Ratio 31 (2018): 214-232
A paper that applies Aquinas's thinking about hope as a passion to the present day literature.
“Repairing humanity's broken watch: Leibniz on original sin” Studia Leibnitiana 42 (2018): 245-260.
A paper that reconstructs Leibniz's account of original sin.
“Hope and practical deliberation”Analysis 77 (2017): 495-497.
A paper that argues that deliberation requires hope.
“Deflating moods,” The Southwest Philosophy Review 3 (2017): 25-32
A paper that argues that moods are nothing more than experiencing a bunch of related emotions.
“Leibniz on unbaptized infant damnation,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 80 (2016): 185-194.
A paper explaining the justness of God toward unbaptized infants.
“Anti-luck virtue epistemology and divine revelation,” Philosophia 42 (2014): 309-320
A paper presenting a problem for ALVE--it can't accommodate certain cases of divine revelation.
"In defense of virtue-responsibilism," Logos & Episteme 4 (2013): 201-216
A paper defending virtue responsibilism from external world skepticism.
“God, time, and the Kalãm cosmological argument,” Sophia 52 (2013): 593-600
A paper arguing that William Lane Craig's account of God's relation to time is in tension with the K.C. argument.
"The conciliatory view and the charge of wholesale skepticism,"Logos & Episteme (3): 619-627
A paper arguing that conciliationism leads to radical skepticism.
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.