Overview
My work is in moral psychology, agency and responsibility, the nature of the self (including self-ownership), personal identity and ethics, and the philosophy and moral psychology of humor (especially as it is affected by and bears on morality). My previous book Responsibility from the Margins (OUP 2015) developed a pluralistic theory of responsibility, drawn in part from empirical work on agents with various mental and personality disorders, and leaning heavily on a wide array of human emotional responses. I published two books in 2024. The first, Wisecracks (U. of Chicago Press), is about the surprisingly intimate relationship between humor and morality. The second, The Architecture of Blame and Praise (Oxford University Press) offers a new functionalist account of the blame and praise system, demonstrates the complicated yet symmetrical forms these responses may take (towards both others and ourselves), and presents an original desert-free justification of them all.
In the news
- Ethics expert on dark discourse around death of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- Holding people responsible through a system of blame, praise
- A&S honors 10 faculty with endowed professorships
- Philosopher mines the ethical line in caustic wisecracking
- Students host first undergraduate philosophy conference
- Struggling with sarcasm: Cornell expert on why Musk’s Grok chatbot isn’t funny
- Arts and Sciences faculty featured on Academic Minute
