Georgetown University

Graduate Student, Philosophy

Thesis Title: How to Do Things with Reasons

About

I am a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University. My primary research interests are in metaethics, normative ethics, and bioethics. I am especially interested in meta-normative theory, including issues related to practical rationality, normative reasons, and other debates within action theory.  I have secondary interests in many areas of normative ethics -- including global justice and human rights -- and bioethics -- especially environmental ethics and the ethics of biotechnology.

In 2007, I graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an AB in Philosophy. My senior thesis, directed by Selim Berker, was entitled The Scope of Morality: An Evolutionary Approach.

Dissertation

Good choices are guided by the balance of reasons for and against the options at hand; bad ones made in defiance of it. This suggests a comparative standard of practical reasoning: do what you have most reason to do, on pain of irrationality. Yet many decisions are rationally underdetermined. When there is no favored alternative, we must choose by sheer will—the force of reasons cannot guide us.

What does underdetermination mean for us as agents? Some see it as a threat to self-intelligibility; others as an opportunity for identity-forging choice; still others as a common and unimportant feature of our deliberative lives. I analyze all three perspectives, find them important but flawed, and work to unify the basic truths about human agency that each exemplifies into a new understanding of the connection between agency and choice.

Read more here: http://www7.georgetown.edu/students/kwh6/home/dissertation.html

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