Research

Under Review (Drafts are available upon request)

• Desires, Salience, and Motivational Impact
  In this paper, I challenge Sebastian Watzl’s claim that psychological salience behaves like desires, having a necessary motivational impact. Watzl argues that salience is characterized by a felt pull of attention (which can eventually lead to mental conflicts), and practical (action-directed) dispositons. Inspired by the intriguing case of Leontius in Book IV of Plato’s Republic, I argue that the kind of pull salience may cause is not sustaintable in a way that justifies mental conflicts and that the practical disposition present in many cases of salience is not a product of salience itself but of the encounter of a salient object with one’s desires, plans, or ends.
• Do You Mind Violating My Will? Revisiting and Asserting Autonomy
  In this paper, I discuss a subset of preferences in which a person wants the violation of desire they chose to make effective. I argue that such cases provides us with a unique insight into personal autonomy from a proceduralist standpoint. Proceduralists, such as Frankfurt and Dworkin, defend a liberal and content-neutral approach, in which autonomy entails the agent's endorsement of the desires that move her actions. In the first part of my argument, I analyze some examples in light of Frankfurt's endorsement theory and argue that even while we cannot endorse a practical decision we want to be violated, we nonetheless regard those cases (under certain conditions) as blatantly autonomous. Therefore, autonomy does not necessarily require endorsement. Instead, I propose that the nature of the relevant highest-order volition dictates what procedure should be established in one’s desire structure for its fulfillment. In the second part, I discuss how the agent may effectively consent to the violation of their decision by another person. Because ordinary consent refers to actions but fails to communicate one's higher-order desires or commitments, I propose a practical tool that accomplishes this by signaling shifts in the normative context agents interact.

Work in Progress 

• Caring for Valid Sexual Consent
  In this paper, I address aIn an anonymous post on a popular online Q&A platform, a person asked: “Is it wrong to feel violated even though I consented?” Setting aside whether it’s wrong to feel that way (it seems pretty safe to say it isn’t), I believe the sentiment described here points out a neglected condition for consent. In this paper, I argue that this feeling may arise when a person consents to sex without (justifiably) trusting their partner to act only within the scope of their consent. I refer to this as the trust requirement and argue that it is met in sexual relationships when the consenting person knows that their partner cares about them to a sufficient degree. This requirement not only grounds consent but also leads to safer intimate relationships where partners mutually contribute to the consensual character of their relationship.