My philosophical interests are in ethics and moral psychology, with a primary focus on Kant’s ethics. My work on Kant’s ethics can be divided into two broad projects. The first aims to defend the view that Kant’s ethics includes significant duties to cultivate moral feelings, such as love and sympathy. In a recent paper (“Active Sympathetic Participation”), I argue that Kant’s third duty of love (die Pflicht der Teilnehmung) commands agents to cultivate the requisite sympathetic feelings necessary to participate affectively in the lives of others.

I am also generally interested in the intersection between happiness and morality. I have long been intrigued by Kant’s decision to frame obligations of beneficence in terms of a duty to promote the happiness, not merely the welfare, of others. This has led me to explore the role and status of happiness and its pursuit in Kant’s ethical theory. At the moment, I am particularly interested in what Kant did not have to say on the subject of promoting others’ happiness, namely, he does not specify that we ought to promote others’ happiness in accordance with their virtue (or even their perceived virtue). My recent work on the scope of Kantian beneficence has brought to light questions concerning the relationship between the pursuit of one’s own happiness, moral development, and proper self-regard. I am presently engaged with some of these questions.

In addition to my work in Kantian ethics, I also have teaching and research interests in bioethics, especially with regard to issues concerning procreation. I am currently working on a paper entitled “Accessories to Procreation: On the Distribution of Procreative Responsibility in Assisted and Collaborative Reproduction”. This paper defends a principle of procreative responsibility and argues that procreative responsibility must be distributed across the various parties who participate in assisted and collaborative reproduction including fertility doctors and gamete donors.

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