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, moral psychology, and connected questions in epistemology. 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 2025, I am co-organizing the Cyprus Metaethics Workshop, and the Rethinking Moral Intuition Conference (also in Cyprus) with Christos Kyriacou.

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