On Moral Perception
Under Review
Redacted to protect blind review.
About
Welcome to my website. I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. My research lies at the intersections of mind, value, and epistemology.
This page contains (mostly) up-to-date abstracts of essays and my cv. Feel free to email me for paper drafts.
Papers
Draft papers — click to expand
(Desires Don't Need No) Satisfaction
Draft · in progress
This paper starts by assuming satisfied desires make a persons life go better, meaning that desire-satisfactionism (DS) is at least weakly true. I then consider Parfit's famous case against unrestricted versions of DS: After you meet a stranger on a train, who you learn is in the late stages of a fatal illness, you form the desire that they recover. Unbeknownst to you, they do. Does this satisfied desire make your life go better? Nearly all, including DS theorists, think it does not. In attempting to escape this counterexample, DS theorist have tried to delimit the range of welfare relevant desires as to not include such desires, and have argued that a certain positive epistemic relationship must hold between a desirer and their satisfied-desire for the desirer to accrue welfare benefit. I argue in turn that both routes fail to provide the DS theorist any escape.
Drafts are works in progress. Please do not cite without permission.