By using the term evaluative philosophy of mind, I am trying to draw attention to philosophical work which studies the value judgements we make about mental phenomena like experiences, desires, and actions. There is already work which does this, but it is often split amongst moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics.
A natural question to ask is whether this is not already wholly covered by the study of moral philosophy. My response is that, while in its broadest sense moral philosophy can and should consider questions about what we judge to be valuable, it tends to focus at a higher level on questions about how values should trade off against one another. This leaves little time for understanding in detail the nuances of how specific value judgements within a particular domain are formed. For example, while it might be relevant to moral philosophers to understand what makes works of art in general valuable; if you are interested in understanding why a particular work of art is valuable, and what it is about it that makes it valuable in just this way you are better off studying aesthetics.
Drawing on this example further: one way to explain the concept of an evaluative philosophy of mind is by direct analogy to the field of evaluative aesthetics.
I first encountered the term "evaluative aesthetics" in a seminar by Andrew Klevan on aesthetic evaluation and film. I think there is something telling in the fact that even though the seminar was advertised to philosophy students it was taught out of an english department building - as if the messy business of judging works of art, and of figuring out how those judgements work and where they come from, needed to be kept at arms length from the philosophy department's more abstract goals.
"Some people," says Klevan "might be interested in the form and media of art while not being interested in value". As an undergraduate I found this statement overly diplomatic... it felt to me like most canonical philosophical works on aesthetics, especially within the analytic tradition, restricted themselves to talking about form and medium, and nothing else.
Personally I started studying aesthetics for a very specific reason - I wanted to study human values, and I felt that aesthetic values would make an interesting case study. For this reason, my own motivation to study philosophical questions about aesthetics in general is entirely to do with value. I happen to also think studying aesthetic form and medium is essential, but only in as much as it helps clarify thinking about how aesthetic values arise from and interact with them.
I think it might be possible to take a similar approach to philosophy of mind. While I am very sympathetic to making room to study metaphysical questions about the "form and media" of minds, I think that a large reason to study these things in the first place is because of their bearing on how our values interact with them. For example, while I am somewhat troubled that the metaphysical possibility of p-zombies might introduce strange non-naturalistic elements to my ontology, I am much more troubled that it might imply that conscious experience is something that we would systematically fail to judge as valuable in the right ways or for the right reasons.
If you are reading this and have favourite examples of work that matches this description, please send it to me.