I am Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics and Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins University, jointly appointed in the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and secondarily appointed in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
I initially moved to the US in 2017 as a visiting research scholar in Princeton University's Program in Cognitive Science. Until then, I had lived most of my adult life in the UK. I completed my BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford and was a fellow of All Souls College for many years. I also worked for a decade as an assistant team therapist at the Oxford Complex Needs Service, a National Health Service specialist service for people with personality disorders and complex needs.
My research is highly interdisciplinary: I tend to explore philosophical questions that arise out of clinical practice and related sciences, and I work on topics across philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, practical ethics, and criminal and mental health law and policy. I also aim for much of my philosophical work to have wider academic and public relevance.
My book What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction will be published by Princeton University Press in 2026. It argues for a new paradigm for addiction that is both humanistic and heterogeneous, integrating addiction science with philosophy, clinical practice, and the psychology and voices of people with addiction themselves. My previous work on addiction has been published across a range of venues, including Mind & Language, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Hastings Center Report, The American Journal of Bioethics, Neuroethics, Nature Neuropsychopharmacology and Psychopharmacology. Together with Serge Ahmed, I edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction and I am a member of Marco Venniro's lab.
I have also worked to articulate an idea of responsibility without blame derived from my clinical experience. I designed an e-learning that is freely available for anyone interested in learning more about responsibility without blame and developing their ability to work and relate effectively with people with personality disorders and complex needs; responsibility without blame also informs the ethical framework for addiction proposed in What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction.
I am currently working on two books. The first is the culmination of a longstanding collaborative project with Nicola Lacey. We are writing a book that draws together and significantly extends our previous work about the value of responsibility without blame to the theory and practice of criminal law in today's moral and political world. The second is entirely new and nascent. Much of our thought and talk has been shaped by the power and influence of religion over our history. One result is that, as an atheist trying to express or make sense of important and meaningful aspects of one's experience, one's words and ways of thinking are saturated with religion. My aim is to write a book embodying an atheistic worldview that finds words for, and shows how it is possible to do justice to, dimensions of human experience that hitherto religion has claimed—for example, experiences we would naturally describe as of grace, of miracles, of awe, of rage at cosmic injustice, of a need to do something like pray when the fates of those we love are uncertain and we are powerless. You can hear me talking about this idea toward the end of an interview with Kieran Setiya on his Five Questions podcast.
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