Hi!  I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, VA.  For the previous 4 years, I enjoyed living in Flint, MI as Assistant Professor at Kettering University.  I work on foundational and applied questions in ethics, political philosophy, and environmental law.  

 

The applied dimension of my work focuses on public lands and is influenced by my experience growing up in Arizona in a family of outdoor recreationists and preservationists.  I recently provided philosophical and legal analyses of the Antiquities Act [1][2] (used to create national monuments) and The Wilderness Act.  I am now working on a book that explores who ought to manage public lands and how those lands ought to be managed.  As part of this, I consider arguments for privatizing public lands, giving federal lands to U.S. states, and returning lands to Indigenous tribes.  

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My work in foundational ethics analyzes how values differ from one another and call for different policies.  In Journal of Ethics, I used a fitting-attitude approach to distinguish intrinsic from instrumental values.  This provides a foundation for earlier publications in which I provide an account of how something can be valuable for its own sake without having an intrinsic property that makes it so [1] [2].  

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In my free time, I enjoy road/gravel cycling, swimming, running, backpacking, bikepacking, and dj-ing house music. Surfing is my newest folly.