I teach moral and political philosophy as being about our common life, and I run a classroom on the premise that students with different backgrounds, preparation, and politics should be able to argue with one another — and with me — on equal terms. Three commitments organize my courses. Productive disagreement: students practice defending views they reject, canonical texts are paired with live controversies so disagreement has stakes, and discussion is managed so criticism lands on arguments rather than people — the part of my record I'm proudest of is that students routinely report they can't identify my own politics. Evaluating arguments: nearly everything I assign builds two skills, stating an argument better than its author did and constructing the strongest case for a view. Multidisciplinary reading: my courses pair philosophy with the best empirical work on how the concepts operate in practice, so students stop treating the questions as abstractions.
Instructor of record. Course titles link to syllabuses where available.