Much of my research stems from an examination of epistemological challenges to moral realism, focusing in particular on evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). While conducting this research, I realized that the metaethical debates I was examining were deeply tied in with general debates about causal explanations and counterfactual semantics. My dissertation therefore focused on contributing to these topics.

As a post-doctoral fellow at CMPP, I intend to continue exploring the prospects of a plausible EDA of moral realism. In particular, I intend to explore an idea that I began examining in my dissertation: namely, the idea that some phenomena call out for explanation. Many philosophers assume that there is a unique class of phenomena that call out for explanation, but few have closely examined this assumption. It serves as a premise for some EDAs because it is thought that moral realists are committed to a correlation between our beliefs and mind-independent truths, and evolutionary theory implies that such a correlation must be coincidental. In my research I will call this assumption into question.