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 is focused 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.  Elsewhere, I have explored competing claims of justice underlying urban planning decisions and the values mentioned in the Endangered Species Act.  I am now starting a book that evaluates whether federal ownership of public lands is justified.  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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I also have work in foundational ethics.  I use a fitting-attitude approach to analyze how values differ from one another and call for different policies.  In Journal of Ethics, I used this approach to identify how intrinsic and instrumental values differ from one another.  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.