Philosophy

I am a Philosophy PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a philosopher, I am broadly interested in value theory and the philosophy of mindfulness, particularly normative ethics, moral psychology, as well as social and political philosophy.

I received my BA in Philosophy with a Certificate in Ethics summa cum laude from Arizona State University in 2020. I believe philosophy can play a valuable role in working towards a more compassionate, mindful, and just society.

Some current projects include:

• Mindfulness and Moral Emotions (MA Thesis)
  • Many people (particularly Buddhists) believe that being a mindful person is generally a morally good way to be. But this idea conflicts with common intuitions about moral emotions—particularly blaming emotions like guilt and resentment—that make it look like being mindful might sometimes make one morally worse. In this paper, I reconcile this tension by (i) presenting a secular (though Buddhism-compatible) account of mindful moral emotion and (ii) arguing that under this account mindful moral emotions do not carry their apparent moral costs, or at the very least such costs are compensated by moral gains. Along the way, I argue that key assumptions motivating the apparent tension are misguided, while gesturing at ways in which mindful moral emotions (and mindful moral emoters) are plausibly morally better than their non-mindful counterparts. I show that you can be a mindful blame-embracer, and you can do so without risking any virtue.
• What is a mindful person, and what is a mindful action?
  • I am working on a new, philosophically precise account of both dispositional mindfulness (i.e., trait mindfulness, or, what it is to be a mindful person) and mindful action.
• The case for mindfulness-based bioethics
  • In this paper, I argue that in order to help bioethics practitioners mind the theoretical gaps in their methods, bioethicists ought to (i) insert non-theoretical, self-corrective elements into their methods and (ii) consider a mindfulness-based strategy as one promising option for such an element.
• Academic Freedom and the Legitimacy of Transphobic Views
  • In this paper, I argue that trans-affirming agents ought to actively work towards the institutional delegitimization of transphobic views, including those that are supposedly nuanced. By this, I mean that such agents ought to stop taking any and all transphobic views seriously as beliefs and encourage their institutions’ practices to similarly reflect this where such views are currently legitimized.

A few questions (of many) that interest me right now:

• How does mindfulness relate to moral agency and progress?
• In what way is mindfulness morally and/or epistemically valuable?
• Should we strive to live an ideally mindful life? What would such a life look like given facts about our psychology and well-being?
• What ethical problems arise when we try to mass produce mindfulness and integrate norms of mindfulness into different public settings?