My work explores questions at the intersection of philosophical ethics and cognitive science. My current research aims to better understand the relationship between morality and the emotions. I am especially interested in two emotions that are often - but obscurely - referred to as “moral”: disgust and anger. I’m also interested in the philosophy of psychiatry and mental disorder and, more recently, the relationship between trauma and moral responsibility.


Publications

A More Thought-ful Ape? Comments on A Better Ape by Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell (2023). Biology & Philosophy, 38 (4): 1-12. doi: 10.1007/s10539-023-09921-1

In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell (2022) provide an ambitious and compelling history of the evolution of human morality. Informed by evidence from an impressively vast multidisciplinary literature, they offer a rich bio-cultural evolutionary explanation of how the human moral mind arose and developed over time that has wide appeal for philosophers and scientists alike. In this paper, I examine Kumar and Campbell’s novel moral psychology and raise questions about their account of the relationship between moral norms and core moral emotions. I also argue that social essentialist cognition has a place alongside the moral emotions as a key ingredient in Kumar and Campbell’s view of the moral mind as well as in their normative account of how to work towards moral progress.

Is There Such a Thing as Genuinely Moral Disgust? (2022). Review of Philosophy & Psychology, 13, 501-522. doi: 10.1007/s13164-021-00539-4

In this paper, I defend a novel skeptical view about moral disgust. I argue that much recent discussion of moral disgust neglects an important ontological question: is there a distinctive psychological state of moral disgust that is differentiable from generic disgust, and from other psychological states? I investigate the ontological question and propose two conditions that any aspiring account of moral disgust must satisfy: (1) it must be a genuine form of disgust, and (2) it must be genuinely moral. Next, I examine two prominent accounts of moral disgust by John Kekes and Victor Kumar and argue that neither successfully establishes the existence of genuinely moral disgust: Kekes’ account does not satisfy condition (2), and Kumar’s view does not meet condition (1). I claim that an important general lesson can be drawn from my critiques of these accounts: to establish the existence of moral disgust, one must provide unequivocal evidence that genuinely moral disgust, not generic disgust or anger, is being elicited in response to relevant moral violations. I conclude by considering why we ought to be skeptical about the general prospect of giving a positive answer to the ontological question, given the available evidence.

Psychopathy, Autism, and Questions of Moral Agency. In C. D. Herrera and A. Perry (Eds.), Ethics and Neurodiversity, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013). Here's the pre-print version.  

Works in progress

A paper defending the existence of a distinctively moral kind of anger.

A paper exploring the relationship between past trauma, present wrongdoing, and attributions of blame and responsibility.

A paper about contempt, disgust, and the moralization of “clean eating.”