In my research, I develop and defend a eudaimonist virtue ethics, both against other approaches in ethics and against other kinds of virtue ethics. Eudaimonism is characterised by the ideas that only living virtuously is unconditionally good, that other things are good only relative to living virtuously, and that it is a mistake to sharply distinguish living well, living ethically and living happily.

I defend purely dynamic eudaimonism (PDE), the view that eudaimonia, or the final end of practical reasoning, is constituted by virtuous activity alone. The focus on activity is the dynamicity, and the sole constitution claim is the purity. PDE stands in contrast to views which focus on the possession of virtue, or fail to cleanly distinguish between virtue and its exercise. My basic defence is that the structure of PDE’s account of the good best answers to our practical predicament—the practical demands with which we find ourselves, and which push us to try to become practically wise.

Articles

In Defense of a Narrow Drawing of the Boundaries of the Self

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This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in the Journal of Value Inquiry.
The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09761-2

Abstract:

In his monograph Happiness for Humans, Daniel C. Russell argues that someone’s happiness is constituted by her virtuous engagement in a certain special sort of activity, which he calls embodied activity. An embodied activity is one which depends for its identity on things which lie outside of the agent’s control. What this means is that whether or not it is possible for the activity to continue is not completely up to the agent. A motivating example is my activity of living alongside my spouse. Whether or not it is possible for this activity to continue is not entirely within my control, because my spouse might die, or otherwise become unavailable to me. To defend the view that it’s embodied activities which are constitutive of happiness, Russell defends what he calls the embodied conception of the self. This is the view that the boundaries of the self whose happiness is at stake include all the constitutive parts of our embodied activities.

In response, I provide two arguments. Firstly, I show that while Russell makes a good case for the relevance of embodied activities to happiness, he doesn’t establish that we must adopt the embodied conception of the self in order to obtain those insights. Secondly, I argue that to draw the boundaries of the self in accordance with the embodied conception involves forming beliefs in a way that is not epistemically responsible. In making this argument I rely on the claim that there is a strong, particular sense in which other people are unknowable to us, a claim which is developed in the fiction of Haruki Murakami.

PhD thesis: Purely Dynamic Eudaimonism

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Summary:

I develop and defend a eudaimonist virtue ethics, both against other approaches in ethics and against other kinds of virtue ethics. Eudaimonism is characterised by the ideas that only living virtuously is unconditionally good, that other things are good only relative to living virtuously, and that it is a mistake to sharply distinguish living well, living ethically and living happily. I first develop an account of what’s common to all eudaimonisms, called minimal eudaimonism. I then consider what more should be said beyond the core of claims to which all forms of eudaimonism are committed. I defend purely dynamic eudaimonism (PDE) against other eudaimonisms and against non-eudaimonist conceptions of the final end for our practical reasoning. PDE is different from other eudaimonisms in holding that happiness is virtuous activity alone, that virtue is not perfectible, and that to exercise virtue is always further to develop it. These theses distinguish PDE from archetypal Aristotelian conceptions of virtue and happiness, and each has significant normative implications, which I explain and explore.