It is difficult to detail the specifics of each of my articles and my book projects in a short page like this, but I think the easiest way to think about what I do is to think in terms of substantive "foci" and conceptual "upshots."

First, my research revolves around essentially four substantive foci: 1) the environment, 2) public health/vulnerable populations, 3) emerging technologies, and 4) the tools of public policy. Almost all of my work aims to dissect and analyze conceptual issues associated with the environment (primarily with cases involving environmental remediation technologies and invasive species), public health (usually with cases involving population and sleep), vulnerable populations (often related to animals, but sometimes also dealing with fetuses and prisoners), or the tools of public policy (typically involving topics like the moral hazard, property rights, and perverse incentives).

Likewise, there are four conceptual upshots that I have aimed to explore: 1) moral considerability 2) autonomy/rights, 3) justificatory liberalism, and 4) indeterminacy/risk. Conceptually speaking, almost all of my articles aim at advancing a criterion of moral justification, and specifically advocate a view of environmental decision-making that is not limited by the narrow, "harms-based" approaches common to many public policy decisions. My objective is to defend the priority of the right over the good, to buttress the importance of non-consequentialist arguments in the environmental policy discourse. More colloquially, I aim to create space for the wide array of approaches to environmental problems represented by the various disciplines in the environmental studies program. I tackle questions related to justification and obligation in my articles by appealing to at least one of my three conceptual upshots. In an attempt to produce material that is philosophically rich but also intriguing to non-philosophers, I have in several cases co-authored articles on topics related to public health, geoengineering, or environmental remediation. For clarity, consider briefly the content of my research as categorized under the four substantive foci.

Consider, for instance, each of the four substantive foci in turn:

The Environment: Most of my articles related to the environment cover questions of environmental protection, conservation, or remediation.  This collection of papers seeks to argue that harms-based positions associated with environmental remediation technologies do not adequately capture what is wrong with specific policy interventions. For instance, those who argue that geoengineering is too risky seem to suggest that, were it not too risky, then there would be few problems with geoengineering. Against this, I argue that even if the risks can be alleviated entirely, this alone cannot be sufficient to permit geoengineering. Similarly, I have argued that remediation technologies, which aim primarily to reverse harms done, do not sufficiently address wrongs done, and therefore do not exhaust the list of our responsibilities to the environment.

Public Health and Vulnerable Populations: I have several publications that address concerns in public health. In one set of articles on public health and sleep, for instance, my co-author (a public health demographer and my sister, not incidentally) and I argue that the empirical public health research can be enriched by a conceptual argument that explains choices and options in terms of autonomy, or self-legislation. Though it may seem peculiar that I have several publications in the demography of sleep, it is notable that sleep is a peculiar sort of public health behavior. Namely, it is not easily characterized as a choice, as many are inclined to believe. Other public health behaviors, like diet, exercise, hygiene, education, etc., can be understood as patterns of choices that we make. Therefore, they are subject to a generalized class of objection that my co-author and I have termed the “voluntarism objection.” We have then argued that sleep is different; that individuals cannot straightforwardly choose to sleep, since one can neither will oneself to sleep nor will oneself awake. Sleep is therefore not subject to the voluntarism objection, unlike most other public health behaviors. Insofar as this is the case, we call for a much more robust picture of choice and autonomy. Since tenure, however, I have also been writing on environmental justice issues and vulnerable populations, specifically with regard to e-waste and pollution.

Emerging Technologies: Some of my early work began with explorations of emerging technologies like face recognition technology, genetic modification, and geoengineering. In more recent years I’ve been addressing questions of assisted recolonization, de-extinction, e-waste, alt-proteins, and artificial intelligence. In almost all cases, I aim to disentangle some of the more technocratic and optimistic attitudes that lend support to public enthusiasm for addressing environmental issues through these technologies. For instance, some of my more recent work on alt-proteins suggests that the economic market for meat is nowhere near as determinate as many in the alt-protein sector claim that it is. I argue instead that that there are many responses that strategic actors (producers and suppliers of meat) can take to buffer themselves and their market from downside impacts, and that this fact about those markets generates a causal impotence challenge to conscious consumerist reasoning.

Tools of Public Policy: I have gradually been developing a project on the tools of public policy with related work in the pipeline. My work on moral hazards, in particular, has received considerable attention. A moral hazard is an economic term and policy tool used to describe cases in which agents increase their exposure to risk after a specific policy intervention. In my articles I argue that there is nothing inherently moral about the moral hazard; that the term is instead used to stanch moral discussion and to exclude it from the public policy discourse.

In my very early work I presented a positive theory of moral considerability, demonstrating that the scope of moral theory can be determined by attending closely to the constitutive rules of interaction. To make this case, I explored the subject-centered position of Kant, and the more intersubjective positions of Rawls, Korsgaard and Habermas, to propose that we must adopt a third approach, an interaction-centered approach, in order to understand the roots of this complex problem. I defended the interaction-centered approach by proposing that the principles that undergird early and later variations of Kantianism – namely, that agents are to harmonize their personal maxims with constitutive rules, whether they be the Kantian moral law or Habermas's formal pragmatic rules – also point to an imperative on the part of agents to take non-human others into moral consideration.

It was my contention there that animals, plants, and natural objects require of us a consideration that bears on moral problems. Ultimately, I proposed that not considering the entities with which we, rational beings, interact constitutes a failure of reason. I demonstrated this failure of reason by showing that rational reflection depends upon our own coming to terms with our beliefs about who we are as agents, which we do by engaging the world seriously, as though it responds to us. What is reason, I argued, if it is not informed by the consideration of another? What is rationality, I continued, if it does not entail seeking an answer by taking up the world as a serious interactant? If we ignore our relationship to the world around us, and the world's reactions to our actions, we ignore constitutive obligations that give content to our reasons. I demonstrated this by deferring to the way in which obligation takes root in Kantian moral philosophy. Where the strong Kantian moral position negates all non-human entities because they are not rational, the deontological position that I am advocating, the interaction-centered approach, includes non-human entities precisely because we, humans, are.