Overview

My main research interests concern fundamental questions about values, reasons, and agency. I am currently writing a book, Making it Matter, which explores and develops a view of the will according to which agents can, under the appropriate circumstances, quite literally will considerations to be reasons. This view presents itself as the most plausible expression of the central Kantian idea that rational agents do not simply passively receive reasons by discovering or recognizing them but have a more active role in determining what reasons they have. It thus provides an alternative – and, I suggest, plausible – way of understanding the autonomy and freedom of rational agency.