I am an Associate Professor in Georgetown's Philosophy Department and a Senior Research Scholar at Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a think-tank on campus that specializes in bioethics.
I did my graduate training at Oxford, Princeton, and Berkeley, and taught for two years at Bryn Mawr College before joining the faculty of Georgetown. I have been visiting faculty at the Dept. of Clinical Bioethics at the NIH and at Johns Hopkins University and served on the ethics committee of Montgomery Hospice.
Almost all of my work focuses on one or another issue in ethics. My current fascination is with something I've dubbed ‘Deontic Pluralism’—an ugly name for an important issue. Many moral theorists have tended to focus on the thinnest possible assessments of action —on what is permissible or impermissible, required or forbidden. While such categories are important, exclusive focus on them tends to obscure … [more]
