Hello and welcome to my website! I'm Joseph (Joey) Van Weelden, a philosopher specializing in ethics. Starting in September 2024 I will be an Instructor in Philosophy at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, BC, Canada. From 2019 to 2024 I was an Assistant Professor at Ahmedabad University in Gujarat, India. I received my PhD from McGill University (2018), under the guidance of Professors Sarah Stroud and Iwao Hirose. I have an M.A in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and a B.A (Honours) in Philosophy from the University of Alberta. I was born in North Vancouver, BC and mostly raised in Sherwood Park, AB.
Although I enjoy thinking about and teaching all areas of philosophy from applied ethics to epistemology, the primary focus of my research to date has been the philosophy of well-being, In my PhD dissertation I formulated and defended an (unconventional) hybrid theory of well-being, which I believe has certain distinct advantages over its competitors. My attraction to hybrid theories of well-being has predictably led me to spend a lot of time thinking about what it is that subjective and objective theories, respectively, get right. So far I have been mostly focused on the subjective strand of (what I think is) the truth about well-being. I have previously argued that desire-satisfaction theorists have strong reasons to favour one formulation of the theory, which I call the object view, over the alternative combo view. I am currently working on another article arguing, against a rising tide of subjectivist voices, that there are no compelling reasons to favour more recently developed subjective theories over the desire-satisfaction theory. I intend to turn next to the issue of what even the most plausible version of the desire-satisfaction theory gets wrong. In another ongoing project, which concerns well-being but is somewhat removed from my broader hybrid theoretical ambitions, I am attempting to provide a more thorough investigation of the problem which Larry Temkin, among others, calls the Single Life Repugnant Conclusion than can be found in the current literature. Finally, I am working on a paper on the enormously influential, but not always clearly formulated or well-understood, resonance constraint on welfare goods. Aside from well-being, I have also published on and have a long standing interest in the (epistemic and moral) status of moral testimony. To learn more about my research and publications, click on the 'Research' tab above.
I am also a founding member of the Well-Being Working Group, which brings together early career philosophers working on well-being and related issues. For more information on this initiative please see the following page, prepared and maintained by my esteemed friend, colleague and co-organizer Anthony Kelley.
I can be reached at joeyvanweelden@gmail.com.
