Stavros Orfeas Zormpalas -Research Themes

I got my PhD in Philosophy from Brown University in 2024, under the supervision of David Christensen and Jamie Dreier.

I work in (meta)ethics (including moral psychology), and connected questions in epistemology and philosophy of mind. My main research project concerns a virtuous kind of dogmatism that characterizes our moral commitments; that is, the fact that we arguably morally and epistemically ought to prioritize our intuitive moral commitment for or against certain acts, over our commitment in any theory about the nature of goodness and badness. If I believe that goodness is the property of respecting autonomy, and I come to believe that torturing babies does not disrespect their autonomy (perhaps because I get philosophical evidence that babies don't count as having autonomy yet), I should update my theory of badness, not my stance against torturing babies. 

I find this dogmatism intuitive, but philosophically puzzling. I believe thinking about it can help us solve pressing questions across value theory. Some of the questions that my work asks, concerning this dogmatism, are:

• What kinds of epistemic relationships need to hold between our intuitive beliefs and (meta)ethical theories for the dogmatism above to be principled?

• What kinds of mental states should we be dogmatically attached to (e.g. belief-like or desire-like)?

• What kinds of concepts could these mental states employ in order for our dogmatic attachment to them to be rational and morally virtuous in a variety of evidential situations?

• What questions and explanatory challenges across value theory can this dogmatism resolve and, specifically, what implications does it have, if any, for first order moral theory? I believe this includes questions on the ethics of AI.

In response to those questions, I am developing a view called moral phenomenalism. The idea is that rational and moral dogmatic commitment is commitment in certain  motivational mental states that employ phenomenal (rather than theoretical concepts): The good and rational person is motivated to not cause THIS (phenomenal concept pointing to one's inner grasp of suffering experiences or of autonomy-limiting experiences), rather than to any mental states employing intellectualized views about autonomy or suffering. 

In 2025, I co-organized the Cyprus Metaethics Workshop, and the "Rethinking Moral Intuition" Conference (also in Cyprus) with Christos Kyriacou. In 2026-2027, Christos Kyriacou and I are guest-editing a Synthese Topical Collection also entitled "Rethinking Moral Intuition".

My email is "stavros_orfeas_zormpalas" followed by "@alumni.brown.edu"