I am currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Between 2017 and 2021, I was Assistant Professor at NMSU. Before that, I spent a number of years as a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Before any of that, I earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which was awarded May 2009. In my dissertation, which I defended on January 16, 2009, I defend the view that pleasure and pain are legitimate, measurable quantities. My advisor was Fred Feldman. Before UMass, I spent two years studying at Arizona State, but I didn’t take a degree. My thesis advisor at ASU was Peter French, who was the director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and a senior editor of the Midwest Studies in Philosophy. Before ASU, I spent five years at Western Washington University, where I earned a BA.

My area of specialization is ethics. I’m interested in value theory in general and issues surrounding the computation of value in particular. I’m also interested in the relationship between value and normative ethics, and in non-naturalism and cognitivism in meta-ethics. In working on my dissertation, I developed several interests in the metaphysics of quantity as it relates to ethics, such as whether “rough equality” makes sense, and puzzles concerning various types of incommensurability.

Some people at the Univesity of Texas have put up a philosophical geneology based on supervisor/student relationships. In virtue of my being a student of Fred Feldman, I’m the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson of Immanuel Kant, and the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson of G. W. Leibniz.

I was also a kind-of-like-but-not-really member of the Monads.

If you want to see my CV, you can look here. (PDF)

My dissertation is available here.