Thursday, February 19 2026, 4:30 - 6pm 115 Peabody Hall Anthony Kelley Philosophy and Religious Studies Louisiana State University Anthony Kelley's Faculty Page Paradigmatic cases of value capture occur when the rich and subtle object of a subject’s valuing attitudes is supplanted by the flat and coarse-grained values of an institutional metric that they have voluntarily accepted (e.g., the shift from valuing a healthier lifestyle to valuing taking 10,000 steps per day). Such shifts strike us as bad for the subjects who undergo them, but there is no agreement about how to characterize this harm. I argue that the harm of value capture is best explained by a desire-based account and that this result, in turn, provides an additional reason to accept a desire-based theory of welfare more generally. Anthony Kelley is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Louisiana State University, as well as the Associate Director of the Ethics Institute at LSU. Professor Kelley specializes in theoretical and practical ethics, especially as it relates to questions concerning the nature of human flourishing.
