Hi there!  I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, VA.  Prior to this, I enjoyed living in Flint, MI where I was Assistant Professor at Kettering University.  I work in ethics, political philosophy, and environmental law.  

 

The applied dimension of my work focuses on public lands: who should own them and how should they be managed?  These interests developed from my experience growing up in Arizona within a family of outdoor recreationists and preservationists.  I recently provided philosophical and legal analyses of the Antiquities Act [1][2] and The Wilderness Act [1] [2].  I am now working on a book that evaluates arguments for privatizing public lands, giving federal lands to U.S. states, and returning lands to Indigenous tribes.  

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Meanwhile, I have work in foundational ethics that 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.