Derek Christian Haderlie

About

I work on issues surrounding metaphysical explanation (grounding), often with an eye to metaethical issues. Aside from metaphysics and metaethics, I also have an interest in philosophy of religion.

Outside of philosophy, I enjoy ultra endurance trail running, music composition and production, and reading and watching films with my family.

Before coming to BYU, I was a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with Jon Litland and Jonathan Dancy. My dissertation was on the metaphysics of moral laws. Before that, I completed an M.A. at Virginia Tech, working with Tristram McPherson, and prior to that I completed an undergraduate degree in English Literature at BYU-Idaho.

I co-organize Metaethics in the Mountains with Ryan Davis.

You can find my CV here. The best way to reach me is at derek [dot] haderlie [at] gmail.

Research

Articles

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  Against Propositionalism about Moral Laws

  Noûs. Forthcoming.
  Propositionalism, the view that moral laws are propositional, is nearly a truism in metaethics. Against this, I argue that those who hold that moral laws play an ineliminable role in moral explanation should reject it. If laws are to play such a role, they must make what explains relevant to what is explained. Yet if laws are themselves propositions, this requirement yields an explanatory regress. I develop a relational alternative according to which moral laws are generative relations rather than propositions. This relational account avoids the regress, preserves the explanatory role of moral laws, and has significant implications for metaethical theory. In particular, I show that it yields a non-trivial formulation of non-naturalism and clarifies the relation between moral and metaphysical explanation.
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  Against Grounding Trinitarianism (with Taylor-Grey Miller)

  Faith and Philosophy. Forthcoming.
  Christian metaphysics advances a surprising thesis about the nature of fundamental reality: the fundamental level of reality is triune (in some sense). Certain Christian traditions maintain that there is a hierarchical structure within the trinity, and recently it has been proposed that such relations should be explicated in terms of the notion of metaphysical ground. This paper is a systematic exploration of the viability of a ground theoretic account of this conception of fundamental reality. We argue for two claims. First, the only adequate ground theoretic accounts must involve laws of ground and must take them to play distinctive explanatory roles. Second, taking the laws of ground to play these distinctive explanatory roles raises a dilemma: either fundamental reality isn't triune in the way demanded by the Christian account, or it makes poor predictions about the modal status of certain facts about the laws of ground.
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  Grounding Legalism (with Jon Erling Litland)

  Philosophical Quarterly 76 (1): 196–218. 2026.
  Many authors have proposed that grounding is closely related to metaphysical laws. However, we argue that no existing theory of metaphysical laws is sufficiently general. In this paper, we develop a general theory of grounding laws, proposing that they are generative relations between pluralities of propositions and propositions. We develop the account in an essentialist language; this allows us to state precisely the sense in which grounding might be reduced to laws. We then put the theory to use in showing how moral laws can play a role in grounding particular moral facts, in defending monism about ground, and in showing in what sense there is no gap between the grounds and the grounded. Finally, we make a novel proposal about what grounds facts about ground.
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  How to be a Monist about Ground: A Guide for Pluralists

  Erkenntnis 90 (6): 2261–2278. 2025.
  Is there one univocal or generic notion of ground? Monists answer yes, while pluralists answer no. Pluralists argue that monism cannot meet plausible constraints on an adequate theory of ground. My aim in this paper is to articulate a monist theory of ground that can satisfy the pluralist constraints in a way that leaves the pluralists with no reasons not to endorse the monist picture of ground. I do this by adopting a tripartite conception of ground and then showing that it has the resources to vindicate monism while satisfying the pluralist constraints on a theory of ground.
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  Evil and Embodiment: Towards a Latter-day Saint Non-Identity Theodicy (with Taylor-Grey Miller)

  Religious Studies 61 (1): 93–105. 2025.
  We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day Saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God's soul-making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day Saint theology has the resources to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications rooted in the problem of horrendous evils, and show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns.
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  Faith: How to be Partial while Respecting the Evidence (with Taylor-Grey Miller)

  Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (1): 67–72. 2021.
  Some think that partiality is a normative requirement of faith. Katherine Dormandy disagrees, arguing that partiality runs afoul of epistemic norms that faith requires. We offer an account of how one can respect the partiality requirement while respecting the epistemic norms as well. Central to the account is the role that confrontation plays in negotiating faith relationships where one has damning evidence about the object of faith.
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  Sider's Puzzle and the Mormon Afterlife (with Taylor-Grey Miller)

  Journal of Analytic Theology 8 (1): 131–151. 2020.
  There is a puzzle about divine justice stemming from the fact that God seems required to judge on the basis of criteria that are vague. Justice is proportional; however, it seems God violates proportionality by sending those on the borderline of heaven to an eternity in hell. This is Ted Sider's problem of Hell and Vagueness. We show that this puzzle can be extended to Mormon theology and argue that Mormon theology has sufficient resources to reject proportionality as a constraint on divine judgment by adopting a nuanced version of universalism called escapism.

Book Chapters

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  Ethical Considerations in Corpus-based Legal Interpretation Analysis (with Brett Hashimoto)

  The Routledge Handbook of Ethics in Forensic Linguistics. Routledge. 2025.
  Recently, there has been growing interest in using corpus linguistics for interpreting legal texts. Proponents believe that corpus linguistics provides a better empirical basis for analyzing meaning than other methods. However, critics argue that corpus linguistics is not appropriate for legal interpretation for myriad reasons, including because of several ethical issues. The present chapter motivates and provides a framework for evaluating the appropriateness of particular uses of corpus linguistics as a tool for analyzing legal texts. The framework is grounded in a broad notion of responsibility, including ethical and epistemic responsibility. By conceptual analysis, we derive six principles that seem like necessary conditions for responsible use of corpus linguistics.
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  Is God Subordinate to Law?

  Contemporary Philosophy and the Latter-day Saint Tradition. Routledge. Forthcoming.
  What is God's relation to law? Many within the Latter-day Saint tradition have been drawn to the view that God is, in some sense, subordinate to law. In this paper, I provide prolegomena to a theology of that relationship. I first argue that the subordination thesis is highly ambiguous, and that different disambiguations have very different theological implications. On this basis, I propose a taxonomy of possible interpretations. I then examine three historically significant arguments for divine subordination and show that each is less compelling than has often been supposed within the Latter-day Saint tradition. I conclude that while the question remains open, much more conceptual work is required before a robust Latter-day Saint theology of divine subordination can be established.

Reviews

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  Review of God, Knowledge, and the Good, by Linda Zagzebski

  Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2022.
  A review of Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski's collected papers in the philosophy of religion, organized around eight themes: foreknowledge and fatalism; the problem of evil; death, hell, and the resurrection; God and morality; omnisubjectivity; the rationality of religious belief; rational religious belief, self-trust, and authority; and God, Trinity, and the metaphysics of modality.

Works in Progress

Please contact me if you would like to see a draft of any of the following.

Under Review

• A paper on the connection problem for grounding (with Jon Erling Litland and Taylor-Grey Miller)
• A paper on the prospects for grounding modality in essential truths

In Progress

• A paper exploring the prospects for modal voluntarism — the view that necessities depend on God's contingent creative activities (with Taylor-Grey Miller and Slater Simek)
• A paper developing an argument for moral particularism within a ground-theoretic context
• A paper on the nature of generative relations
• A paper defending non-naturalism from an objection that non-naturalists are guilty of thinking bad thoughts (with Ryan Davis)
• A paper exploring the epistemology of moral expressivism
• A paper exploring the prospects for a sui generis notion of aesthetic obligation

Teaching

I regularly teach courses in metaphysics, metaethics, and logic. I am happy to share syllabi and other course materials — please contact me if you would like to take a look.