Research

My research is primarily in ethics (especially moral psychology and metaethics) and ancient philosophy.

Publications

• “Classic Hedonism Reconsidered”, Utilitas 36.3 (2024): 193–210. See here.

Few views have seen a more precipitous fall from grace than hedonism, which once occupied a central position in the history of ethics. Recently, however, there have been efforts to revive interest in the view, ranging from arguments in staunch defense of hedonism to well-motivated pleas for contemporary ethicists to at least take the view seriously. In this article, I argue for the seriousness of hedonism on metaethical grounds. Taking John Stuart Mill’s argument for hedonism in Utilitarianism as a test case, I show that historically classic hedonism was not argued for in isolation as an ethical view, but was rather grounded metaethically via a commitment to two positions: (1) an empiricist epistemology, and (2) the view that pleasure occurs in sensation. Together, these two positions provided principled grounds for various iterations of classic hedonism. Moreover, these two positions are still serious options in both contemporary epistemology and the contemporary literature on the nature of pleasure. Insofar as a contemporary ethicist takes those two views seriously, they ought to take classic hedonism seriously as well. That is, to truly discount classic hedonism as a viable position in value theory, one must argue against at least one of those positions, and this is a non-trivial task.

Papers Under Review

• A paper on Aristotle’s account of indefinite phantasia in De Anima III.11

Papers in Preparation

• A paper on Aristotle’s analysis of Eudoxus’ argument for pleasure as the highest good in Nicomachean Ethics X.2

• A paper on the relationship between the Epicurean cradle argument for the pleasure as the highest good and the Epicurean empiricist argument for the same conclusion

• A paper on the reception of Democritus’ concept of euthymia in early modern philosophy and science

Dissertation: Pleasure as Evaluative Perception

Pleasure is a familiar and normal part of everyday life. Consider the pleasure of stepping into a warm bath. There are at least three seemingly intertwined features of this experience. The first is perceptual: the experience involves the sensory feeling of the warm water on the skin of one’s legs. The second is evaluative: the warm water feels good on the skin. The third is motivational: one’s desire to submerge oneself fully in the bath. Ancient philosophy typically incorporated all of these elements in their discussions of pleasure, thereby furnishing unified and systematic accounts—none moreso than Aristotle’s. Rooted in and inspired by Aristotle’s account of pleasure, I advance a novel framework with which to investigate foundational questions about pleasure. According to what I call the Evaluative Cognition framework, pleasure is best understood not as an object or property of experience, but as a form of evaluative perception—a way of sensing that something is good for the perceiver. Experiencing something as pleasant is a way of finding it good without necessarily thinking that it is good. Taking pleasure in something is a way of valuing it at the level of perception rather than thought, and it is possible for these valuing modalities to conflict with one another (for example in cases of akrasia). A striking consequence of this framework is its rejection of a commonly accepted axiom in value theory: the claim that pleasure is intrinsically good (and pain intrinsically bad). That the Evaluative Cognition framework leads to the rejection of this axiom may at first glance seem to warrant dismissing the framework out of hand. However, I contend that understood as a mode of evaluative cognition, pleasure (and pain) can still play a foundational role in how we understand the relationship between value and action. Pleasure is a primitive form of valuing for human and non-human animals. It is best understood as a biological mechanism which, when working properly, leads animals to things that are genuinely good for them.