Research

My work sits at the intersection of moral philosophy, political economy, and the philosophy of knowledge. Across projects, I return to a single question:

How do people reason, judge, and cooperate well when knowledge is limited, dispersed, and partly tacit — and what kinds of institutions, moral habits, and traditions help them do so?

That question has drawn me into four overlapping literatures: the moral and economic thought of Adam Smith, the epistemology of Michael Polanyi and F. A. Hayek, the Catholic intellectual tradition on property and the common good, and the scholarship of intelligence analysis. Each throws light on the others. Smith's impartial spectator, Polanyi's tacit knowledge, Catholic Social Teaching on property, and the working analyst's craft all point — from different angles — to the same basic insight: that human reason is most useful when it works within, rather than against, the social and moral orders that make knowledge and judgment possible.

Adam Smith's moral and political economy

Smith is the anchor of my research. I have written on his theory of value, his treatment of property in the Lectures on Jurisprudence, and his account of "error" and the impartial spectator. A through-line in this work is that Smith takes human irregularity seriously without concluding that it needs correcting from the outside — a stance that separates him from both strict rationalism and much contemporary behavioral economics. I am developing this strand into a longer treatment of Smithian moral epistemology.

Social Epistemology

Polanyi and Hayek each argue, in their own idiom, that useful knowledge is irreducibly personal, local, and partly tacit — and that this fact has deep implications for planning, expertise, and institutional design. My work in this area asks what follows: how self-governing scientific communities, hierarchical organizations, and decentralized markets each earn their place by handling particular kinds of knowledge problems. An ongoing project on the Roman Catholic Church treats its hierarchy as an economic case study of this trade-off.

Property, classical liberalism, and Catholic social thought

A long-running project examines how the classical liberal account of property relates to the tradition of Catholic social teaching from Rerum Novarum forward. My recent paper on Adam Smith and (the) Pope(s) Leo argues that the Thomistic and Smithian accounts are more continuous than standard readings allow, and that recent magisterial writing has sometimes lost the balance Leo XIII struck. The larger aim is constructive rather than polemical: to articulate a vision of property in which the universal destination of goods is served by, rather than opposed to, private ownership.

Intelligence analysis as applied epistemology

Since joining JMU's Intelligence Analysis program, I have worked on the epistemological foundations of analytic practice. Drawing on Polanyi, I argue that the dominant positivist picture of analysis — bias-reduction, structured techniques, "ground truth" — captures only part of what good analysts actually do. The other part depends on forms of tacit, experience-formed judgment that resist full codification and have important consequences for training, professionalization, and ethics in the field.

Social Science through literature

A thread running through my work from its earliest days uses literature to teach and extend economic ideas. My first published essay (2008) examined the role of faerie in Tolkien and Lewis. My dissertation drew on folk and fairy tales to surface features of ownership that tend to go invisible to specialists. A forthcoming article in the Journal of Markets and Morality reads C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce as a treatise on scarcity, dependence, and the ordering of desire.