I am a moral, political, and legal philosopher. In Fall 2023, I became an associate professor of professional practice in the Department of Management and Global Business at Rutgers Business School. Previously, I have been an assistant professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I have also had fellowships at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, and in the Law and Philosophy Program at UCLA. I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from UCLA in 2010.

I write and teach about the ethics and the just regulation of business and other economic activities, such as the financing of health care. My recent work has focused on three areas:

  1. Ethical constraints on voluntary transactions. Informed consent is not always enough to make an economic transaction ethical. I defend under-appreciated ethical constraints on fair transactions, including strong standards of workplace safety and moral norms regarding wages and pharmaceutical pricing.
  2. Law as an ethical constraint on individuals and firms. I examine the extent to which there is a moral obligation to obey the law and when, if ever, it is morally permissible to treat fines or other legal sanctions as costs of doing business.
  3. Ethical limits on law enforcement. Sometimes, I argue, government should make a law and demand that people follow it, but it should not enforce that law coercively. In some social circumstances, there are important criminal laws that should not be enforced with the threat of imprisonment.

My work draws on the Kantian tradition of ethical and political theory. I believe that Kant's formula of universal law can help us to reason more clearly about contested ethical questions, such as the question how consensual yet wrongful exploitation is possible. Nevertheless, I reject Kant's view that a nation of devils could achieve a rightful condition, if only they could create the right coercive institutional structure. I argue that we cannot coerce our way to a decent social order. A just society, or even a decent society, requires widespread internalization of many social norms.