I was born to Russian immigrants in Maoz Aviv, Israel in 1972. In 1982 my family moved to Los Angeles, where I've spent most of my life. LA is often portrayed as a superficial place, but it’s also a fantastically creative place and I consider myself a product of its creative community. My interest in philosophy began both from a general curiosity about the big picture and from the personal need to find a way of life which best fulfilled the apparently-conflicting ethical ideals to which I found myself attracted. It is the aim to understand the world and how to live my life within it in an imaginative and hopefully wise way that still guides me today. I believe that this aim comes through as a part of my enthusiasm for the topics I teach, and mentoring students through their own ethical inquiries has been one of my most fulfilling achievements as a philosopher. After receiving my BA in Philosophy from UCLA in 1995, I worked in a variety of industries including as Sr. Assistant to the Director of Tourism for New York City, Sr. Assistant to the head of production of Geffen Records, and web consultant for Disney Consumer Products. In 1999 I returned to school and completed my MA in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick in England. At that time I also started dating my wife Alona in Riga, Latvia. Returning to LA, I worked for another year as a web programmer for a boutique Hollywood web development firm, before beginning my doctoral studies at the USC School of Philosophy. Currently, I am a doctoral candidate at the USC School of Philosophy with an expected graduation date of May 2009. My dissertation, guided by Dr. Stephen Finlay explores the fundamental variety of, and relationship between, ethical judgments. (link to dissertation abstract) The other members of my dissertation committee are Dr. John Dreher and Dr. Sharon Lloyd, both of which have provided me with invaluable guidance and insight. Once my dissertation is complete, I hope to continue to work on the problem of moral disagreement -- a larger research project of which my dissertation forms a central part. I am also working at this time under a Lords Foundation grant to revise and develop a string of business ethics experiential workshops for the USC Marshall School of Business's Experiential Learning Center. I've been very excited about the opportunity to develop these workshops. Not only have they taught me a lot in terms of pedagogy -- particularly as I struggle with the task of developing better ethical deliberators, incorporating various multi-media components within the experiential workshop format, and attempting to assess whether the workshops actually do help make students better ethical deliberators within business contexts. I believe that these workshops also offer me a rare opportunity as an ethicist to practically engage with ethical topics of great immediate concern and (indirectly and nondogmatically) to bring good to the world. It is that same desire to communicate on ethical issues with non-philosophers that led me in 2000 to begin writing critical essays which largely focused on exploring ethical issues relating to the conflict between bohemian ideals and the practical demands of living with others. At that time, I founded GetUnderground.com -- a large award-winning submainstream arts and culture website. Over the next 3-4 years I published 70 or so essays on Get Underground, as well as numerous other magazines and websites. For a while, I self-published and sold some of these essays as bound collections titled The Cutting Edge :: Softened and Wrestling with the Bohemian, but my school work kept me too busy to pursue publication further and I have not written creative essays in the last couple of years. These collections also feel very out of date to me now as they mostly deal with ethical questions I faced in my 20s. I hope to return to popular writing once my dissertation is over. I have a half-finished third collection of essays addressing philosophical topics of interest to creative types titled Philosophy for Artists and Other Practical Folks. I am also in the drafting stages of a non-academic book with my brother, Rabbi Sher, about the comparative virtues of the religious/non-religious life.