Stavros Orfeas Zormpalas - Papers

Published and forthcoming work:

• (Im)moral Theorizing?, in Philosophical Studies. This paper responds to a recent immorality problem raised against non-naturalists. It argues that there is no special problem for non-naturalists, but rather a general one for metaethicists. Furthermore, resolving this problem enlightens us on general methodological questions in metaethics: Metaethicists will likely need to adopt a methodology that treats certain first order views as epistemically prior to their theoretical views. (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01939-1)

• How can the first order come first?, in Philosophical Studies. If new evidence brings your metaethical view in conflict with a dearly held first order moral belief, what are you to do? This paper presents intuitive arguments for the claim that we epistemically ought to privilege some of our first order views relative to our metaethical views. However, spelling out the details of this view proves hard. In so far as there is such first order epistemic privilege, its story is complicated: it will depend on the details of the evidential situation, and it will not consist in certainty in the relevant first order views, nor in a mere difference in our credences in the first order vs. the metaethical. (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-025-02385-x a downloadable pre-print is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JO8sUAbpglO-9JBIsekiNDZAvNh-mKSr/view?usp=drive_link and a read-online version of the published article (with no paywall) here: https://rdcu.be/eINm0)

• Moral Motivation and Rich Representation, forthcoming in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. A popular view on moral worth, Anti-Fetishism, states that an action motivated by concern for moral rightness represented as such is not praiseworthy. This can be seen if we appreciate that whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good moral theorist, as good people can misrepresent moral rightness and not be motivated by their mistaken grasp of it. But then what does an action need to be motivated by in order to be praiseworthy? I argue that Anti-Fetishism's key insights give us reasons to reject the positive answers provided to this question by Anti-Fetishists themselves. The source of the Anti-Fetishist insight is much broader than originally thought: whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good theorist in general, as good people can misrepresent many kinds of facts. This makes the question of praiseworthy motivation difficult, and also reveals that certain types of morally relevant descriptive ignorance do not excuse wrongdoing. I tentatively suggest a solution: an action is praiseworthy if motivated by a set of representations whose intuitive moral import is unaffected by our potential theoretical mistakes: phenomenal representations of others' lives.

• Can metaethics change our moral views?, accepted chapter In forthcoming volume: A Collaborative Guide to Metaethics. Edited by Alex Stamatiadis-Brehier. New York: Routledge.

Drafts (withholding titles and details to aid anonymity in peer-review):

• A paper raising a moral twin earth problem for moral fixed points non-naturalism.

• A paper raising a new problem for conceptual views of epistemic justification for our moral views. The problem lies in specifying which concepts can be part of a proposition of the type "X is good/bad" that qualifies as conceptually justified.

• A paper arguing for a disconnect between the metasemantics of moral terms and intuitively important questions about what to be motivated by. The paper further argues that metaethicists are often not clear on which of the two they are tackling, and this leads to dialectical stand-offs that would be dissolved if they were indeed clear on this.

Long personal notes that will (hopefully soon) turn into papers:

• On Artificial Agents' actions' moral worth and the problem of moral fetishism. 

• On the strangeness of moral testimony and how it can be explained away by our (virtuously) dogmatic attachment to first-personal, phenomenal ways of representing the moral landscape.