Background

I received my Ph.D. at Emory University in 1995. After spending a year here at UofSC as a visitor, and then a year teaching philosophy in Ejisu, Ghana, I returned permanently to UofSC in 1997. I have twice had year-long fellowships at the James Madison Program at Princeton University; I’ve also had a visiting fellowship at the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University.

Research Interests

I work broadly in ethics, in an area of natural law philosophy popularly called the "new" natural law theory.  My work spans the foundations of ethics, action theory, and various areas of practical ethics including medical ethics, the ethics of lying and truth-telling, and beginning and ending of life ethics. In 2024-25, I will be on sabbatical, finishing a book on the ethics of killing and beginning a new book project provisionally titled "The Neglected Goods: Work, Play and Aesthetic Experience."

Recent Publications

Books

•  The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession co-authored with Farr Curlin of Duke University (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).
• Natural Law Ethics in Theory and Practice: A Joseph Boyle Reader co-edited with John Liptay of St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan (Catholic University of America Press, 2020).
• Lying and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

 

Articles - Some recent and forthcoming work includes:

• “The Strict Account of Intention and Vital Conflict Cases,” Journal of Natural Law 1: 2025.
• “How to Suffer,” Journal of Anselm Studies, forthcoming, 2024.
• “Cell Lines of Illicit Origin and Vaccines: Ethics and Metaphysics,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2023, 1-20.
• “New Natural Law Theory and Human Rights,” in Cambridge Handbook on Natural Law and Human Rights, Tom Angier, Iain Benson, and Mark Retter, eds., 2022.

Other work available at Academia.edu.

Regularly Taught Courses 

I teach a variety of undergraduate classes as needed, including our Junior and Senior Seminars for Majors. Recent topics for those seminars have been the ethics of lying and truth-telling, and the nature of law.  Recent graduate seminars have focused on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams (2024) and natural law jurisprudence (2022)..

Blogs and Public Philophy

I have published a number of more popular essays over the last 13 years for the online journal Public Discourse which are available here.