SUMMARY
Law, moral agency, and collective life.
My research asks how beliefs shape behavior and institutions—and how ordinary practices and standing institutions, in turn, shape what people believe.
I was drawn to the philosophy of criminal law because it sits at the intersection of legal, political, and ethical theory. Questions about criminalization are never only about which acts are harmful. They are also questions about political authority, moral agency, social roles, public meaning, and the standards a community may legitimately enforce.
DISSERTATION
Criminal Law and the Setting of Standards
My dissertation challenges arguments that call for a sharp reduction in criminal law on deceptively simple moral grounds. Instead, I develop a pluralist account of criminal law’s functions. Criminal law may protect rights and respond to wrongdoing, but it can also set role-specific standards, shape conduct through discipline, and symbolize collective commitments. The central problem is to explain when these functions are legitimate and how they can be limited.
Accepted dissertation · Indiana University Bloomington · Defended June 5, 2026 · Submitted August 2026
The complete dissertation develops this account across four chapters on criminal-law minimalism, standard setting, criminal negligence, and hate-crime statutes, followed by appendices on overincarceration, overpunishment, and overcriminalization.
1. Against an impulse toward minimalism
I identify a family of arguments that move too quickly from moral concerns about punishment or liberty to a drastically narrowed criminal law. These arguments often obscure the variety of moral work criminal law already performs.
2. A pluralist account of why we criminalize
I distinguish among protecting rights, shaping behavior, setting standards attached to social roles, and expressing commitments that structure a shared political project.
3. Negligence and role-based responsibility
The dispute over criminal negligence is best understood as a dispute about the limits of moral demands attached to roles—such as those of doctors, parents, and other people entrusted with distinctive responsibilities.
4. Hate crimes and the democratic promise
Hate-crime enhancements are generally defensible as expressions of liberal-democratic commitments, yet their inflexibility becomes troubling within a wider system already marked by overpunishment.
Ideas for work emerging from the dissertation
My immediate research program is to develop the dissertation’s chapters into standalone papers and extend their shared framework.
Agency and criminal-law theory
How broad or narrow a theory’s conception of moral agency is can determine which criminal prohibitions it sees as legitimate. This project makes that usually implicit disagreement visible.
Symbolizing and disciplining
A theory of criminal law should explain—not merely assume or reject—the conditions under which law may legitimately influence conduct through public symbols and disciplinary standards.
Role responsibility
A thicker constructivist account of roles may clarify responsibility across legal theory, especially in negligence cases where the relevant demand depends on what someone has undertaken or been entrusted to do.
Projects in liberal democracy
Collective symbolic commitments can sometimes be enforceable without abandoning liberal neutrality. The challenge is to distinguish shared political projects from coercive moral conformity.
Overenforcement
Some areas of criminal law may be objectionable principally because of unjust enforcement rather than because the underlying restriction on liberty is itself indefensible.
The “too many laws” objection
Counts of criminal laws often double-count overlapping provisions and treat redundancy in the letter of the law as if it directly measured the burden imposed on citizens.
Additional projects underway
- Environmental ethics: Routley and Routley’s “last man” example and whether major moral theories can answer it through precautionary principles.
- Intellectual history of criminal responsibility: the development of mens rea from Augustine’s analysis of perjury and promising through Edward Coke’s formulation of actus reus and mens rea.
- Rawls and Niebuhr: Reinhold Niebuhr’s influence on John Rawls’s undergraduate thesis and the possible afterlife of “the egotist lie” in Rawls’s secular liberalism.
- Rights and deplatforming: why arguments for excluding groups from one social-media platform may fail when repeated exclusions aggregate into a broader violation of rights.
- Meaningful practices: videogame speedrunning, the myth of Sisyphus, and the spectacle of sport as resources for questioning when repetitive or apparently mundane activity is genuinely meaningless.
Possible future areas of research that I have done some work on
Law and political membership
- Immigration enforcement, undocumented residence, the history of borders, federal authority, and the formation of social identity.
- Just and unjust grounds for secession and the conditions under which a liberal democracy should accept a claim to political self-determination.
- Competing forms of legal moralism, including those associated with Lon Fuller and Michael S. Moore.
- Anti-terrorism law as a further test case for criminal-law legitimacy.
Belief, possibility, and practice
- Whether ignosticism—the view that “God” is insufficiently defined—can be separated coherently from agnosticism.
- Modal accessibility understood through conceivability, including the status of strange or unimaginable possible worlds.
- Publicly available surveys of moral reasoning, political ideology, and philosophical belief designed in collaboration with philosophers and social scientists.
Collaboration and public philosophy
I am interested in collaborative working groups that cross institutions and in open, public-facing discussion formats that could function both as philosophy and as alternatives to reading-centered pedagogy. I would also like to contribute to conference organizing and to develop philosophically serious public surveys whose assumptions are transparent and whose aggregate results can improve later versions.
These projects continue the central concern of my academic work: institutions do not merely regulate what people do; they help determine what people see as reasonable, possible, and worth doing together.
Selected talks
- Hate Crimes and the Construction of Protected Classes — invited talks at Georgia College & State University and Fresno State, April 2026
- Hate Crimes and the Promise of Liberal Democracy — Pacific Division, American Philosophical Association, April 2025
- AI and Education — panelist, Midwest Ethics Symposium, Prindle Institute for Ethics, April 2024
- Challenges of Justified Distrust for Contemporary Liberalism — Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Society, November 2023
