-Nicomachean Ethics IX.8 1168a13-17
For as long as I can remember I have always loved school. My first exposure to philosophy was senior year in Mrs. Shephard’s AP World Literature class. As a senior, I could pick a writer to read and report back on while doing my internship with Senator Santorum’s office in Philly, and I picked Nietzsche. Reading Nietzsche shook my world; he was playful, profound, norm-shattering, and infuriating, and I was totally hooked. I started Penn State planning on a double major of philosophy and something more “practical”;. I cycled through biology, pre-med, pre-law, and business, before finding what felt like the perfect fit for me and philosophy in English. My undergraduate honors thesis was on Heidegger and King Lear.
For graduate school I applied to a number of English and philosophy doctoral programs. I got into all of the philosophy programs and none of the English ones, which seemed like a sign. At the time I started philosophy at University of Chicago, there were only two women faculty members, Martha Nussbaum and Candace Vogler. As soon as I met Candace, I knew I had to work with her. I’ve heard other philosophers compliment her by saying her mind runs on different tracks, and that still seems to me the right way to capture what I found most valuable from learning philosophy from and with her.
In my second-year, Gabriel Richardson Lear, who had just been hired, taught a twenty-week seminar on the Nicomachean Ethics. I had avoided ethics as an undergrad, viewing ethics as a self-aggrandizing exercise in telling people what to do. The idea that ethics could instead be a systematic investigation into how one should live was mind-blowing. By the end of that seminar, I knew my dissertation would be on the role of pleasure in Aristotle’s practical philosophy. Gabriel also gave me what I think is still the best advice I have ever received: Let other people tell you ‘no’. In other words, don’t supply the ‘no’d yourself. If there is something you want, even if you are not sure you are the right fit, ask, and see what happens. I have tried hard to take this advice to heart.
Having mentioned Candace and Gabriel, I want to say a few words about my other committee member, Jonathan Lear. Jonathan was an amazing philosopher. I have never known someone better able to bring out the significance of everyday interactions, the meaning revealed through a few choice words. While Chicago philosophy is known for following Wittgenstein and his view of philosophy as therapy, I really saw what this meant in practice through Jonathan. He was a practicing psychoanalyst, an amazing reader of Aristotle and Plato, an impressively energetic thinker, and all-around awesome human being. From Jonathan, I learned so much about pedagogy, about how to lead the soul.
There was this puzzle, though. In all sorts of ways, I was seeing how important pleasure was for Aristotle’s ethical system. But, from the little bit of Kant I had been exposed to as an undergrad, I was pretty sure he was anti-pleasure. I started reading Kant more carefully, and after Aristotle, it was a revelation. What I found was someone trying to refigure Aristotle’s metaphysical idea of activity in theorizing how pleasure works, even while holding the famous, oft-misunderstood Kantian line that pleasure could not be the determinative motivation for morally good action.
In 2011, I was hired by Utah State University. I loved working at Utah State. The role of the LDS church in shaping everyday life was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and I learned a lot about by teaching in this unfamiliar cultural context. I found Utah to be a great place to teach ethics. The students were so thirsty for conversation about how to live a good life. Over and over, I found students who were eager to be trusted to think for themselves and who proved themselves more than capable of excellent philosophical work.
I thought I had everything set, but all that changed during Winter break of 2018/19. I was told by the philosophy section head, Charlie Huenemann, that my Dean, Joe Ward, had reservations about my tenure application. I would later learn that he had recommended against tenure, that the Provost’s committee overruled him, but that the President decided to deny me tenure. To justify his decision, the Dean misrepresented my research record, refusing to count papers that were completed and accepted but not yet in print (at the time of submission of my tenure binder) as part of my research record. He would later testify that “while there was no disputing the quality of my research, the problem was the quantity”, a quantitative problem he manufactured. I filed a grievance, but the wheels of justice turn slowly. I was doing job interviews, but then Covid struck and everything shut down. My grievance hearing was pushed back until May. A Utah State faculty committee reviewed the administration’s handling of my tenure application and determined unanimously that my research record had been misrepresented. [If you are interested in details of my wrongful termination, you can review the Utah State’s review committee’s findings here.] However, the President had full authority to do as she pleased with this finding. After sitting on the grievance committee’s finding for weeks, on June 5th, 2020, I was told I was fired, and that as of June 30th, I would be locked out of my Utah State accounts.
Being denied tenure is trauma, no matter how it happens. I fell into depression. I couldn’t understand how someone could be so casually cruel as to destroy my life’s dreams and work over nothing. But there is something to the adage of when life closes a door, it opens a window. That Spring, I had won a fellowship to the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute to write a book about Aristotle and the pleasures of anger. So, for academic year 2020/21, I participated virtually with the other fellows. We had a writing group that restored me, somewhat. This was my first experience of being able to write and think without having to teach, and I loved it. I felt confident I could get a job in philosophy teaching, but I wanted a job where I could do research. In my mind, being pushed out of research was Utah State winning. So I applied to Ph.D. programs in psychology. This seemed to me the way to keep thinking about what I wanted to think about, but safer, more prudent. It certainly felt like a Hail Mary, but luckily, Ken Sheldon took a gamble on me.
My second go-round as a doctoral student has been both easier and harder than the first. It was slow-going at first, learning a new disciplinary language and trying to figure out how to translate various philosophical questions into psychological studies. For example, that first semester, at the initial meeting of TA’s for Research Methods (each of us would lead a lab section every Friday), the professor asked whether we used R or SPSS, and I had no idea what was being asked. But in many ways, I feel more capable and confident now, and I have a research project, which is much of the struggle of graduate school. My fellow graduate students have been amazing — one blessing of graduate school is lifelong friendships. When Ken retired, I started working with Laura King, and that also was healing. Laura is an incredible mentor, someone who helps you become a better version of yourself, as a thinker but also as a person. Laura has the enviable talent of telling you a story that helps you see a conceptual point more clearly, and then, as you keep turning the story over again later, you keep finding more and more. Once Keely Dugan was hired, I started working with her too, and have really benefitted from her expertise in personality psychology and attachment, and her willingness to talk and think about all sorts of things with me.
One other gift graduate school has given me, helping me feel like a whole person again, has been my experience doing summer camps. For the last three summers, I have gotten to do amazing learning experiences that have been so fun and so enriching. In Summer 2024, I did NEH Moral Psychology summer camp. My teachers, Laura Niemi, Shaun Nichols, and John Doris, all really helped me figure out how to push my research forward. In Summer 2025, I did SISPP with Thekla Morgenroth and Mark Brandt. Thekla and Mark were incredible resources for thinking about how to handle politically hot topics and also how to do innovative psychological research. Then, in Summer 2026, I did NEH Aristotle’s Psychology summer camp. I relished the opportunity to read Aristotle closely and carefully again with brilliant philosophers. I am deeply grateful to José Luis Bermudez and Victor Caston for bringing together these scholars and for making me feel like a valued contributor to the conversation.
I love thinking and talking about how we become good people, how this can go awry, and how this matters for personal happiness, at all stages in the lifespan. My academic journey is a story of perseverance, creativity, and my deep love and drive to continue to learn and think with others.
NEH Summer Institute in Moral Psychology, Cornell University
Summer Institute in Social and Personality Psychology, Politics and Gender, Northwestern University
NEH Summer Institute in Aristotle’s Psychology, Texas A & M.
“Commonplace meaning in life.” In K. Vail, D. Van Tongeren, R. Schlegel, J. Greenberg, L.A. King, & R. Ryan (Eds). The Handbook of Existential Psychology. Guilford.
We argue that meaning in life is a surprisingly commonplace experience. The ready availability of meaning in life requires theorizing meaning as found, not only in active search and construction, but also through attention, perception, and recognition.
“The Importance of Pleasure in the Moral for Kant’s Ethics”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, June 2016, Vol. 54 No. 2, pp. 226-246.
I argue for a new reading of Kant’s claim that respect is the moral incentive; this reading accommodates the central insights of the affectivist and intellectualist readings of respect, while avoiding shortcomings of each. I show that within Kant’s ethical system, the feeling of respect should be understood as paradigmatic of a kind of pleasure, pleasure in the moral. The motivational power of respect arises from its nature as pleasurable feeling, but the feeling does not directly motivate individual dutiful actions. Rather, the feeling is motivational in the sense that, after an agent has acted in a morally good way, the pleasure that results from that action contributes to the cultivation of virtue in the agent and, consequently, morally good actions in the future. Understanding the feeling of respect to be moral pleasure not only gives us insight into how finite rational beings develop virtue, but also a new way of understanding respect as an incentive.
“An Anscombian Approach to Pleasure”, Klēsis Revue Philosophique 35, 2016, pp. 164-179.
Despite her claim that pleasure, as a central concept for the philosophy of psychology, needs its own enquiry before we advance to the even more vexing topic of ethics, Anscombe herself never explicitly took up this challenge. Still, Anscombe defends one central claim about pleasure: pleasure is a reason for action, and more specifically, what Anscombe calls a “desirability characterization”. ‘It’s pleasant’ said of some object characterizes the way in which that object seems good to that agent. Further, pleasure is not just one among many equally important ways something can seem good to the agent: pleasure has a central justificatory role within practical reasoning. From this claim regarding pleasure’s important role within practical reasoning we can begin to answer Anscombe’s call.
“Kant, Oppression, and the Possibility of Non-Culpable Failures to Respect Oneself”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, September 2017, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 285-305.
I argue that Kant’s ethical framework cannot countenance a certain kind of failure to respect oneself that can occur within oppressive social contexts. Kant’s assumption that any person, qua rational being, has guaranteed epistemic access to the moral law as the standard of good action and the capacity to act upon this standard makes autonomy an achievement within the individual agent’s power, but this is contrary to a feminist understanding of autonomy as a relational achievement that can be thwarted by the systematic attack on autonomy that occurs within oppressive social conditions. Insofar as Kant’s negative duty of self-respect is unable to accommodate the ways immersion in oppressive social environments can warp an individual’s understanding of what she is owed and capable of as a moral agent, it perpetuates the cruelty of unjust social systems in the guise of respecting individual autonomy. I conclude by considering Carol Hay’s argument that those who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression, in order to explore how this limitation in how Kant conceives of the duty to respect the self may reach expression in contemporary ethical theory inspired by Kant.
“Kant's Quasi-Eudaimonism”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, September 2018, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 317-341.
In contrast to eudaimonism, Kant argues that moral reasoning and prudential reasoning are two distinct uses of practical reason, each with its own standard for good action. Despite Kant’s commitment to the ineradicable potential for fundamental conflict between these types of practical reasoning, I argue that once we shift to consideration of a developmental narrative of these faculties, we see that virtuous moral reasoning is able to substantively influence prudential reasoning, while prudential reason should be responsive to such influence. Further, Kant indicates the integration of virtue as a commitment concerning practical priorities, and so too what should and should not agree with the agent, is beneficial for prudential reasoning by prudential reasoning’s own standards. Although Kant’s ethical system breaks from eudaimonism in significant ways, it retains the eudaimonist claim that virtuously-informed pursuits of happiness are not only better for virtue, but also better for happiness.
“Gilead vs. the Self”, in The Handmaid's Tale and Philosophy: A Womb of One's Own, Open Court Publishing, Popular Culture and Philosophy series, December 2018, pp. 159-170.
In “Gilead vs. the Self”, I use Kant's conception of our groundedness and development into rational autonomy to consider the ways oppression, here imagined in an extreme authoritarian form, may succeed in attacking the integrity of the self. The Handmaid's Tale shows Gilead's systemic attack on self-respect to occur through deploying two temporalities of oppressive force: oppression as a quick onslaught that radically remakes the ordinary and is achieved through the manipulation of fear, and oppression as a slow grind that consists in having to live with the new ordinary and is achieved through the manipulation of shame. Although Gilead uses our rational dependency on others as a weapon, the self can find the strength to try to resist such attacks through the imaginative invocation of another, loved individual, morally better and stronger than the agent understands herself to be.
“Aristotle on the Pleasure of Courage”, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, June 2019, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp. 289-312.
Aristotle repeatedly qualifies the pleasure of courageous actions relative to other kinds of virtuous actions. This article argues that the pleasure of courageous actions is qualified because virtuous activity and its pleasure is dependent upon external conditions, and the external conditions of courageous actions are particularly constraining. The article shows that Curzer’s explanation of the qualified pleasure of courageous actions by the presence of pain violates Aristotle’s commitment to virtuous actions as being pleasant by their nature.
“Kant as Ethical Naturalist: First and Second Natures in Kant's Ethics”, Philosophical Inquiries, special issue on The Virtues and Practical Reason, Vol. 7, No. 2., pp. 111-130.
I argue that Kant's use, in the critical ethical writings, of our nature as autonomous, rational beings (if imperfectly so) to argue against the normative authority of human nature shows Kant's ethical system to instantiate its own distinctive version of ethical naturalism. The formal structure of Kant's argument fits within ethical naturalism: our nature is what explains how we get onto and are bound by ethical norms. What changes is that Kant rejects the authority of human nature to generate these moral norms by arguing that only rational nature as free and autonomous could sanction this sort of normative grip. In order to show the viability of reading Kant as an ethical naturalist, I address two problems: 1) how to specify a Kantian first nature that is not too human, nor too formal and so empty; 2) how to specify a Kantian second nature as some settled disposition towards willing morally good actions and yet compatible with reason's autonomy.
“Blowing Off Steam: Freud, Smut, and Samantha Bee's Political Comedy”, in Ethics and Comedy, ed. Steven A. Benko, McFarland.
In “Blowing Off Steam: Freud, Smut, and Samantha Bee's Political Comedy”, I use Freud's description of how political, purposeful jokes work in ways analogous to smut. I then use this theoretical framework to examine how Full Frontal as feminist comedy reconstitutes Freud's gendered triadic structure of joking. For Freud, jokes are like smut in that they allow for the liberation of sexual and hostile impulses through the playful exchange between the joke teller and the joke listener (typically men) and against the object of the joke (a woman or man one desires/wants to belittle). Bee uses an aggressive, sexually explicit, hostile comedic voice to draw attention to hostility towards women in our political moment and to produce comedic pleasure. This paper offers a more sympathetic account of Freud's theory of the comic, while also considering the power and limitations of comedy to advance political ends and not merely conserve the status quo.
I have also worked with five students majoring in philosophy who chose to write a Senior Capstone Thesis with me, which involves intensive one-on-one work over a semester. The student-selected thesis topics include: Locke on property, Anscombe on birth control, Aristotle on temperance, Anscombe and action theory, and Gilligan’s use of gendered moral norms and capacities for feminist purposes.
Finally, I have worked for many years as the coach of USU’s Ethics Bowl teams. Twice our teams did well enough in the Wasatch regional competition in the Fall to advance to the National competition that Spring
“I just wanted to thank you for your instruction this semester! It was my first and only semester taking so many Philosophy classes, and I wish I could have taken more before I graduated! Anyways, I really appreciated the classes you taught and how you taught them. I learned a lot and grew an even stronger appreciation for reading, learning, and the new ways of thinking about different issues in the world. Thank you so much and I wish you well in future classes you teach!”
“I just finished Plato’s The Republic, and I remembered you saying that in the tenth book it discusses poetry. He says that the poet is the second imitator of the form. For God makes Table and a craftsman makes a table but the poet discusses the table. He warns that the poet must be stripped of his colorful rhetoric to see the truth in his statements.
I thought this was related to our talk on Beyonce and how her art turns into activism or her art is activism. It was nice to hear Plato’s opinion on this. As well, I just thought I’d let you know that your class has provided with more thought in my other readings. Thank you for that. ”
“I hope finals week is going well for you! I came across this video and it made me think of the Theories of Sex and Gender class. I don’t know if you have already seen it, but if not, it would have been a decent show-and-tell. Thank you for this semester! ”
“I hope all is going well with classes, research, and ethics bowl. Thought I’d share a relevant thoughtpiece”
“I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful class this last semester. I feel that I have learned to think for myself in politics and to form educated opinions. I have learned to try to understand both sides of an issue, which is very important, and have come to understand that there is not always a clear cut answer. I am so grateful for the papers and the writing workshops, as I feel that also helped me study the topics more in depth, which allowed me to understand more of the concept. I loved your class, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to take it. Thank you. ”
“I’m a former student, but I was just watching The Good Place on Netflix (you should check it out) and the ethics discussions on the show reminded me of you. I just wanted you to know that even though I wasn’t the best student, you made an impact on me, and I really appreciate the effort you put into your ethics class.”
