About

I’m a bioethicist and moral philosopher at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where I split my time between teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level, research, and communicating with the public. Although I’ve written on a fairly wide variety of topics in my career, the vast majority of my scholarship, speaking, and writing for the public falls into one of two research programs.

The first involves the ethical and policy issues raised by pain, pain medicine, opioids, other drugs, addiction, and North America’s drug overdose crisis. My own entry into this topic was quite personal, after a motorcycle accident in 2015 left with me with a crushed foot, lots of pain, and extended series of reconstruction surgeries in my future. My experience with opioids and the difficulty getting off of them launched my interest in the topic, and eventually became the subject of my TED talk and my first book, In Pain.

My most enduring research interest, however, has involved the overarching theme of “catastrophe.” In particular, I’m concerned with how to engage in ethical reasoning about our own, individual lives in a time dominated by massive, structural threats that are too big and too complex for any one of us to meaningfully address on our own. This has led to many publications on climate change, pandemics, food ethics, and even overpopulation—and is the subject of my second book, Catastrophe Ethics.

When I’m not reading, writing, teaching, or speaking, I’m most often parenting and husband-ing. I also love rock climbing and being outdoors, which—luckily—every once in a while I can enjoy at the same time.