I’m a philosopher with a vested interest in the cognitive and affective sciences. Mainly, however, I’m a hedonist. I’m interested in pleasure: its function, its nature, its place in both scientific and everyday explanations. More broadly: I’m interested in the role of affective processes, like emotions, in relation to evaluations, be they moral, aesthetic, or prudential. I work mainly in meta-ethics: i.e. investigating the basic questions about the nature of value and morality: What is it? What do evaluative and moral terms mean? How do we know about value? How can facts about value be established and studied?

In my dissertation ”Hedonism as the Explanation of Value”, I develop a proposal of how value-theory can be made into an empirically responsible discipline.

The theory defends a version of meta-ethical naturalism: value facts are natural facts, and can be studied as such. It is based on an explanatory approach to value, and the hedonistic version of the theory is based on the centrality of hedonic processes in the relevant explanations.

Interests  Meta-ethics, value theory, philosophy of mind, hedonic psychology, cognitive science, experimental philosophy, aesthetics, neuroscience, behavioral psychology. Non-professionally: Literature, music, TV-shows, food, British comedy, BBC (in particular: radio 4), and all things Stephen Fry.

Currently working on The Next Big Thing in meta-ethics.