Overview
My work explores the nature of normative reasoning, and the connections between moral, legal, and epistemic norms.
In the philosophy of law, my published work defends the claim that legal facts are partly determined by moral facts; raises a new challenge for opposing views, based on the history of legal systems; and argues the persistent disagreement about the relationship between law and morality undermines claims of objectivity in recent legal theory. Apart from jurisprudence, I have published on the philosophy of contract law, on convention-dependent normative questions, on how judges should reason about moral questions under the law, and on the scope of judicial obligations to follow the law.
In ethics and epistemology, my published work includes papers on the ethical implications of broadly expressivist views of the nature of moral thought and talk; on how best to understand the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative; on ground-theoretic attempts to distinguish quasi-realism from full-blooded realism about normative truth; and on the nature and moral significance of knowledge by perceptual acquaintance. My work in this area is increasingly guided by the aim of developing a naturalistically acceptable account of the objectivity of moral demands.
Articles on these and other topics have appeared in Noûs, Philosophical Studies, Law & Philosophy, Synthese, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, Ratio, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Yale Law Journal, New Criminal Law Review, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy, and the American Criminal Law Review, among other venues.
