Caitriona Bobb

This paper offers a philosophical account of what it means to move on. Against the common assumption that moving on requires forgetting, indifference, emotional absence, or devaluation, I argue that moving on is better understood as a change in practical orientation. To move on is to cease organizing one’s life around the fulfillment of a desire, even while the object of that desire may remain valuable. Drawing on Frankfurt’s account of first-order desires, second-order desires, and second-order volitions, I argue that moving on is fundamentally volitional before it is emotional: a person may no longer endorse a desire as action-guiding even while the desire itself remains. Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom further clarifies this process as the proper ordering of desire in response to what is attainable, appropriate, and good. I then argue that what is often lost in moving on is not the object itself, but a possibility connected to it: a future that can no longer be lived. This “death of possibility” explains why grief, nostalgia, and gratitude may persist after one has genuinely moved on. Moving on therefore differs from indifference: both abandon pursuit, but only indifference abandons significance. Acceptance is not indifference, grief is not always opposed to gratitude, and moving on is not the opposite of valuing.

Moral philosophy is often presented as divided between consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-ethical approaches. Yet this familiar taxonomy obscures a deeper pattern in moral reasoning itself. While this framework is useful for organizing theoretical space, it does not fully capture how moral reasoning unfolds in practice. When moral judgments are pressed beyond surface-level justifications, they tend to move beyond rules and outcomes toward assessments of agency, character, and forms of life. This paper develops an account of moral theory diversity as a product of cognitive abstraction. Moral agents operate within an evaluative landscape that is too complex to fully process in ordinary deliberation, and as a result, moral theories function as compression strategies that prioritize different dimensions of evaluation. Consequentialist and deontological frameworks, on this view, are not competing foundations, but partial projections of a deeper, integrated moral practice. To make this account precise, I model ordinary moral justification as a regress that tends to converge on character-level evaluation. As we continue to ask for reasons – why an action is wrong, why a rule matters – justification often stabilizes at the level of dispositions, quality of will, and the conditions of shared human life. I situate this convergence within a naturalistic account of human flourishing, drawing on Aristotelian and Footian approaches, and argue that character functions as a relatively stable explanatory layer within moral evaluation. The paper also introduces the Endorsement-Formation Thesis, which explains why repeated actions carry a non-additive moral weight. Repetition not only reveals deeper endorsement, but also reshapes perception and agency through habituation, altering what actions express about the agent over time. Finally, I explain the persistence of rule- and outcome-based frameworks as a function of their cognitive and institutional utility. While indispensable as tools, they derive much of their normative force from the deeper evaluative structures they simplify. Taken together, this account reframes moral theory diversity as a surface phenomenon and identifies character-level evaluation as a structural attractor within moral reasoning.

This paper offers a philosophical critique of contemporary political science, arguing that its commitment to descriptive neutrality and methodological restraint has produced a discipline that explains political power while evading responsibility for its moral implications. By tracing political science’s historical separation from its philosophical origins and examining its reliance on shallow empiricism, rational actor models, and system-centered analysis, the paper shows how normative assumptions are not eliminated but rendered tacit, displacing judgment onto abstract frameworks. The result is a form of technocratic fatalism in which injustice is explained, managed, and normalized rather than confronted. Political science, on this view, becomes a discipline of inevitability – highly adept at explaining political harm while remaining structurally disinclined to judge or resist it. In contrast, philosophy is defended not as a source of solutions but as a discipline that preserves responsibility, justification, and moral agency within political life. The paper concludes that a discipline devoted to the study of politics cannot plausibly claim neutrality and outsource ethical judgment while shaping the conceptual frameworks through which political harm is understood and governed.

Hedonist subtraction models aim to say how bad death is by tallying the goods it removes. This treatise keeps their currency and arithmetic intact while auditing the suppressed assumptions that drive those tallies. Part One performs a stress-test entirely inside the strongest deprivationist frame (Bradley’s DMP/DMPT, McMahan’s Overall Losses, Egerstrom’s ROLD). Without changing method, ordinary features of human lives – generativity, latency, uptake, and reinterpretation – yield recursive deprivation both forward (loss cascades when value-creating nodes are removed) and backward (later, truth-tracking recognition that reclassifies earlier labor). Point-additive ledgers thereby under-register temporally thick, recognition-dependent goods and mishandle protective-death configurations. Part Two provides a disciplined expansion that stays prudential and first-personal while making the narrative and recognition materials inspectable. Grief is treated as evidence, projection error is constrained via practical-identity guardrails, and recognition/dignity enter the audit. I articulate Human Hedonism (HH) with a Narrative-Hedonic Model (NHM) that preserves counterfactual rigor but adds a standards page, rule-box, workflow, and parameter disclosure (α, β, γ), relocating disagreement to transparent inputs rather than opaque machinery. The conclusion is clarificatory: if hedonism is to speak authoritatively about a life, it must count what its own best cases require – no post-death hedons added, only better classification of what was already lived.

This book presents a contemporary application of Aristotelian virtue ethics, reframing virtue not as an abstract moral ideal but as a practical skill cultivated through deliberate practice. Drawing on the Nicomachean Ethics while adapting its insights for modern readers, it offers a toolkit of methods – such as reframing, imitation, deliberation, visualization, habituation, and intentional "role-playing" – to foster patience, resilience, integrity, and wisdom in everyday life. The work emphasizes that virtue is not about perfection but about continual growth through small, repeatable actions. By integrating philosophical clarity with humor and accessibility, the book seeks to bridge the gap between ethical theory and lived practice, showing that cultivating virtue can reduce frustration, strengthen self-discipline, improve decision-making, and bring deeper meaning to daily life.

This paper challenges the widespread assumption that sacrificing something deeply meaningful inherently diminishes the meaningfulness of a life. Focusing on voluntary sacrifice, I argue that such acts can instead deepen or reorganize meaning when integrated into an agent’s self-conception and narrative value structure. Drawing on the work of Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, and particularly Kirsten Egerstrom, I develop a narrative and agent-relative conception of meaning in life – one that resists reduction to happiness, flourishing, or external success. I examine how deliberate sacrifice functions as a morally serious act that affirms practical identity, and how meaning can persist or even intensify through intentional loss. Engaging with Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and Nussbaum, I contend that meaning is not a finite resource but a dynamic process of narrative coherence. Sacrifice, properly understood, is not the erosion of meaning but one of its most powerful modes of expression.