I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Liberal Arts at Kettering University in Flint, MI.  My research lies at the intersection of Ethics (esp. Value Theory) and Environmental Philosophy.  Dovetailing with this are interests in Environmental Law & Policy, Aesthetics, and Political Philosophy. 

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In one branch of my research, I explore how landscapes and the environment ought to be managed in light of different values, competing interests among the public, and considerations of justice.  I evaluate how public land laws (e.g. the Antiquities Act, The Wilderness Act, etc.) structure public space, with particular attention to how those laws ought to be interpreted or revised in order to protect their target values and respond to the history of colonialism.  I also explore general environmental laws, such as the Endangered Species Act, and competing claims of justice guiding urban planning decisions.  Building on these interests, I am developing a larger project, Public Lands: A Philosophical Guide, that offers an opinionated guide to the philosophical issues arising to people who visit public lands, and to those who live in nearby "gateway" communities. 

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Informing my applied work is my interest in foundational value theory.  I use the fitting-attitude analysis of value to analyze how values differ from one another and call for different policies.  Recently in Journal of Ethics, I identified how intrinsic and instrumental valuing differ from one another.  This provides a foundation for earlier publications in which I provided an account of how something can be valuable for its own sake without having an intrinsic property that makes it so [1] [2].  I am now using the fitting-attitude approach to explore the differences between constitutive, instrumental, "existence," and final value, all of which figure prominently in discussions of environmental goods.