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I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky. Before coming to Kentucky, I was a College Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Ethics and the Center for Biomedical Ethics. I completed my Ph.D. at UCLA in 2016.
I have research interests in normative ethics, bioethics, and social and political philosophy. My current research focuses on the ethics of shaping future persons through the use of reproductive selection. While much of the literature on procreative ethics focuses on procreative harm, I argue that procreators can wrong their offspring by failing to act well in their role as prospective parents. I am ultimately interested in how a person’s prospective moral status constrains the process by which she comes to have that status in the future.
My interest in procreation extends beyond the morality of procreation itself. I treat the case of procreation as a moral data point that both complicates and clarifies our moral theorizing about wrongdoing and the treatment of persons. If a moral theory cannot capture what we owe the persons we create, or if it makes our actual procreative practices incoherent, then we have reason to rethink the assumptions of that moral theory. There isn’t a sharp distinction between normative ethics and applied ethics: if a practice is a serious and deeply embedded part of our lives, then we have good practical reason to look for a moral account of that practice that can make sense of its importance while simultaneously providing us with a normative basis for its evaluation.
Photo by: Charlie Russo