Teaching Experience

I have developed and taught courses in introductory ethics, critical thinking/reasoning, bioethics, philosophy of death and dying, philosophy of law, and military ethics. I have broad teaching interests across all areas of normative and applied ethics, with a special interest in the ethics of technology, ethics of war, bioethics, and global justice; political philosophy; philosophy of law; aesthetics; and several other related areas.

I have experience teaching a diverse range of students, including across many disciplinary backgrounds and with military service members. I was recently part of a U.S. Dept. of Defense-initiated working group tasked with developing the first-ever course in ethics and leadership for the Naval Community College (a new initiative to offer college courses for enlisted sailors). In April/May 2021, I taught the pilot version of this course online. I believe I am the only person to have taught dedicated ethics courses to all three major groups of American military students—cadets (at West Point), officers (at the Naval Postgraduate School), and enlisted (at the Naval Community College). I have also taught members of each of the core branches—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard.

I am also very keen to find avenues for engaging in philosophical education outside the classroom. In 2019, I gave a guest lecture entitled “Is Patriotism Justified?” to inmates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. I also co-created a short-form podcast that explores ethics issues in a digestible but rigorous way, called Open Questions (released through the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics).

My pedagogical approach centers topics of public or personal significance and aims to extract the philosophical questions from them. I believe this both aids in engaging students and teaches them philosophical methods that they can employ throughout their lives. Below you will find syllabi for past courses, as well as some documents intended to guide students in their writing process. I would be happy to share my teaching evaluations upon request.

Teaching Materials

Syllabi: