Here are some things I wrote back when I was an aspiring academic. Read at your own risk.*

*Actually, I now realize that most of these papers are sitting on an external hard drive somewhere, so this will have to wait. Update 03/2026 — I can’t seem to locate the aforementioned hard drive. Some papers I was able to find through old email attachments, but some of the papers I’d love to have shared may be lost to posterity. Or, they may turn up eventually. We will see!

Practical Cognitivism: An Essay on Normative Judgment

This is the dissertation that I wrote between roughly 2012-2018. It started off as an interminable second-year paper which kept expanding. My original question was whether there could be such a thing as “truth” or “objectivity” in ethics. This led me to think more deeply about more fundamental questions, such as: Why do we care whether some domain is “objective”? What do we mean when we call something “true”? How is our thinking in ethics like, and unlike, our thinking in other domains, such as science or mathematics or art? And how do our ethical convictions relate to our actions, intentions, and life plans (what I called “practical commitments”)?

In writing this dissertation I was deeply influenced by the work of Christine Korsgaard and Allan Gibbard, two of my mentors and members of my thesis committee. I was also much helped by Selim Berker and Derek Parfit, the other half of my committee. My views about ethics have shifted and matured since the years I spent working on this, largely in response to my engagement with ethics from the perspective of Buddhist practice. I hope to write more about that some day. So, I don’t know to what extent I would still endorse the view that I here call “practical cognitivism.” (The nice thing about not being an academic is that you can be content with this “I don’t know” — there is less pressure to attach yourself to a particular idea or position for the sake of making a career.)

Vindicating Normativity: An Understanding-Based Approach

I think of this as “the lost chapter” of my dissertation. I wrote it for the Harvard Moral and Political Philosophy Workshop in 2015, and the central idea — which still seems interesting to me — is somewhat buried beneath various dialectical threads I was tangling with while writing my dissertation. Basically, I was trying to articulate a way of doing moral philosophy that is radically different from what we are taught to do as academic philosophers — one that would prioritize the cultivation of moral wisdom as the central goal of moral-philosophical reflection.

Some papers on meta-ethical quietism

Back in 2014-2018 I was developing an argument for a kind of meta-ethical quietism, according to which normative practices do not need to be underpinned by some kind of non-normative, metaphysical “grounding.” In 2017 I published a co-authored article with Karl Schafer in the Routledge Handbook of Metaethics that gave a sketch of this argument, which was still being developed at the time, and cited it as Kremm (unpublished manuscript). Occasionally I still get inquiries about this mysterious unpublished manuscript, which remains unpublished to this day. I am no longer working on these issues, and what I managed to produce is currently scattered across a few different documents. I share them below for anyone who may be interested.

My sense from the last time I checked in is that there are still some people trying to work out arguments along these lines. I am unaware of anyone who has developed it exactly in the way I tried to do here, so anyone who wants to take this torch and run with it, feel free! Drop me a line and let me know if you’re working on this stuff. I’d love to see what you’re up to.