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          I. Recent projects

1. How much land can be included in a national monument? (Environmental Law)

The Antiquities Act gives the president the power to designate “objects of historic or scientific interest” as “national monuments.”  Presidents have used this power expansively, protecting massive tracts of federal land, often by claiming that very large things, such as the Grand Canyon or even entire landscapes, are “objects” in the requisite sense.  There is legal debate over such uses of the Act, with critics arguing that they depart from the original intent and meaning of the legislation.  What has been less discussed, however, is whether the Act allows presidents to protect just the object of interest (whatever it turns out to be), or whether it allows presidents to protect a substantial amount of land around objects of interest.  I draw from language in the Antiquities Act and existing case law to argue for the latter.  Due to the nature of “historic and scientific interest,” protecting an object with such interest often requires protecting certain features of the broader landscape.  This holds regardless of what counts as an “object of interest.”  As a result, my discussion offers a way to argue on certain critics’ own grounds for more expansive designations: even granting a narrow, originalist conception of what qualifies as an “object,” large designations can be justified.  

 

2. The ‘Genre View’ of Public Lands: The Case of National Monuments (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2023)

According to the view that I develop here, public land designations fall into different genres of land management.  The view counterbalances a general tendency among philosophers to overlook differences between land designations.  Focusing on one designation in particular—U.S. national monuments created under the Antiquities Act—I develop the view and illustrate its significance.  I characterize the national monument genre in terms of two norms stated in the Act and show how they shape public space in distinctive ways.  I then illustrate how the genre view opens avenues for evaluating land designations.  By way of example, I evaluate national monuments according to aesthetic considerations.  I argue that the genre is, perhaps surprisingly, aesthetically vexed and that there is an aesthetic reason for presidents to depart from the original intent and meaning of the Act.  Such aesthetic considerations may hold legal weight, lending support for the more controversial, expansive national monuments.  They can also influence policy decisions about whether to protect an area as a monument or whether to pursue a different form of protection.  In these ways, the genre view offers a framework for philosophers to contribute to public lands law and policy.

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3. Aesthetic Justice, in Wilderness? (Routledge Handbook of Environmental Aesthetics)

According to “cognitivist” views in environmental aesthetics, we ought to appreciate natural landscapes for what they are and thus with knowledge of their history.  Such writers tend to emphasize the role of scientific knowledge in such experiences.   Meanwhile, other writers in the environmental humanities have pointed out that even the most natural areas, such as those protected as wilderness in the United States, have a long history of human influence, being the ancestral home of indigenous communities.  Bringing these insights together, I identify a notion of aesthetic justice.  As a matter of appreciating the landscapes for what they really are, and as a matter of giving past people their due, we ought to step into those peoples’ aesthetic shoes and experience the landscapes where they lived as they would have.  This does not mean that we ought necessarily to endorse all the ways they engaged with the landscape, and it does not mean that we must experience the landscape exactly as they had.  Rather, we ought to experience the landscape in a manner importantly similar to how they did, appreciating both the ways the landscape shaped their lives and the ways they shaped it.  The Wilderness Act, I suggest, facilitates this kind of aesthetic justice quite well, and does so better than certain other public land laws.  I end by placing these ideas within the broader constellation of critical discussions regarding wilderness. 

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4. How Final and Non-final Valuing Differ (Journal of Ethics, 2022)

How does valuing something for its own sake differ from valuing an entity for the sake of other things?  Although numerous answers come to mind, many of them rule out substantive views about what is valuable for its own sake.  I therefore seek to provide a more neutral way to distinguish the two valuing attitudes.  Drawing from existing accounts of valuing, I argue that the two can be distinguished in terms of a conative-volitional feature.  Focusing first on “non-final valuing”—i.e. valuing x for the sake of something else—I argue that it involves adopting certain reasons on account of a desire for x to contribute to other things.  I then show how this contrasts final valuing.  The result, I argue, is a plausible account of how the two modes of valuing differ that leaves open a wide range of substantive views about what all can be valued for its own sake.  This is helpful because it develops a popular methodology used to explore the value of a wide range of things, including natural entities, family heirlooms, and artworks, as well as, more broadly, entities that might have “extrinsic final value.” 

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          III. Dissertation​

In my dissertation, I explored how various entities—e.g. family heirlooms, heritage sites, and natural entities—can be valuable for their own sakes, even if they are not the source of their value.  I argued that such entities can be valuable for their own sakes but get their value from how they relate to other things, such as particular people (heirlooms), particular societies (heritage sites), or humanity as a whole (nature).  While such a view has contemporary defenders, not enough had been done to explain when and how objects come to have the above sort of value.  So, in one chapter, the basis for my “An Account of Extrinsic Final Value” in Journal of Value Inquiry 54:3 (2020), I showed how objects, such as family heirlooms, come to have the above value.  Developing an idea from Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, I suggested that an heirloom can be valuable for its own sake on account of its relation to someone one loves, where it is one’s love for the person that partly renders the heirloom valuable for its own sake.  In my paper “No Intrinsic Value? No Problem: Why Nature Can Still Be Valuable for Its Own Sake” Environmental Ethics 42(2) 2020, I built on these points to show how a wide variety of natural entities can be valuable for their own sakes.  Various conditions must hold for this to be the case, so I outlined some of them, with particular attention to how human interaction influences nature’s final value. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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