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Summary

Experimental moral philosophy explores issues in ethics using empirical methods, such as surveys to investigate people’s judgments about particular moral issues, brain imagining to examine the neural bases of moral judgment, and behavioral experiments to examine how various factors influence people’s moral behavior.  A significant focus of this interdisciplinary work has been on people’s particular judgments concerning issues such as moral permissibility, moral responsibility, and moral relativism and on the roles of moral reasoning, moral intuitions, and moral emotions in our moral judgments.  Such empirical research can help support or challenge various ethical theories that rely on assumptions about human psychology. 

Key works

Key early works on the roles of reasoning, intuition, and emotion in moral judgment include Greene 2007, Haidt 2001, Cushman et al 2006, and Nichols & Mallon 2006.  Key studies of moral responsibility include Knobe 2003, Nichols & Knobe 2007, Nahmias et al 2005, Cushman 2008, and Young et al 2007

Introductions For an introduction to issues in experimental moral philosophy, see Doris 2010, Knobe et al 2012, and Appiah 2008
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  1. Eliciting and Assessing our Moral Risk Preferences.Shang Long Yeo - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2):109-126.
    Suppose an agent is choosing between rescuing more people with a lower probability of success, and rescuing fewer with a higher probability of success. How should they choose? Our moral judgments about such cases are not well-studied, unlike the closely analogous non-moral preferences over monetary gambles. In this paper, I present an empirical study which aims to elicit the moral analogues of our risk preferences, and to assess whether one kind of evidence—concerning how they depend on outcome probabilities—can debunk them. (...)
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  2. Coming full circle: Incentives, reactivity, and the experimental turn.María Jiménez-Buedo - 2023 - In Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán Torres & Fernando Aguiar (eds.), Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 144-160.
    For years, the phenomenon of experimental reactivity (defined as the alteration of the subject’s behaviour as a result of their awareness of being studied) seemed to be of little or no concern to experimental economists. With their clear-cut methodological stance shaped by Vernon Smith’s list of precepts, economists could avoid the worries associated with subjects’ reactivity through a rigorous control over the incentives proposed by the experimental setting as designed in the game. More recently, as experimental economists gradually moved in (...)
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  3. Feasibility and Normative Penetration.Matthew Lindauer & Nicholas Southwood - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy.
    An important theme in recent experimental philosophy is that certain judgements (e.g. our judgements involving intentional action and causation) exhibit a kind of normative penetration whereby, in spite of a not-obviously-normative subject matter, they turn out to be sensitive to, and co-vary with, our normative attitudes in interesting and surprising ways. We present the results of several new experimental studies that suggest that our judgements about feasibility also appear to exhibit this kind of normative penetration in at least some cases; (...)
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  4. The Moralizing Effect: self-directed emotions and their impact on culpability attributions.Elisabetta Sirgiovanni, Joanna Smolenski, Ben Abelson & Taylor Webb - 2023 - Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 17 (Emotions in Neuroscience: Fundam):1-12.
    Introduction: A general trend in the psychological literature suggests that guilt contributes to morality more than shame does. Unlike shame-prone individuals, guilt-prone individuals internalize the causality of negative events, attribute responsibility in the first person, and engage in responsible behavior. However, it is not known how guilt- and shame-proneness interact with the attribution of responsibility to others. -/- Methods: In two Web-based experiments, participants reported their attributions of moral culpability (i.e., responsibility, causality, punishment and decision-making) about morally ambiguous acts of (...)
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  5. Stop agonising over informed consent when researchers use crowdsourcing platforms to conduct survey research.Jonathan Lewis, Vilius Dranseika & Søren Holm - 2023 - Clinical Ethics 18 (4):343-346.
    Research ethics committees and institutional review boards spend considerable time developing, scrutinising, and revising specific consent processes and materials for survey-based studies conducted on crowdsourcing and online recruitment platforms such as MTurk and Prolific. However, there is evidence to suggest that many users of ICT services do not read the information provided as part of the consent process and they habitually provide or refuse their consent without adequate reflection. In principle, these practices call into question the validity of their consent. (...)
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  6. Do Moral Beliefs Motivate Action?Rodrigo Díaz - 2023 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (3):377-395.
    Do moral beliefs motivate action? To answer this question, extant arguments have considered hypothetical cases of association (dissociation) between agents’ moral beliefs and actions. In this paper, I argue that this approach can be improved by studying people’s actual moral beliefs and actions using empirical research methods. I present three new studies showing that, when the stakes are high, associations between participants’ moral beliefs and actions are actually explained by co-occurring but independent moral emotions. These findings suggest that moral beliefs (...)
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  7. Advances in experimental philosophy of medicine.Kristien Hens & Andreas de Block (eds.) - 2023 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
    This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be. While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy (...)
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  8. The Challenges to the Study of Cultural Variation in Cognition.Martin J. Packer & Michael Cole - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):515-537.
    We describe seven challenges that confront the kind of cross-cultural research currently practiced in experimental philosophy, illustrating them in an example in which intuitions about moral responsibility were studied in participants in four different countries. The seven challenge are (1) defining culture, (2) finding representative samples, (3) defining cognition, (4) task variation, (5) ecological validity, (6) interpreting the results, and (7) conducting ethical research. We suggest that these challenges can be overcome or avoided by attending to the ways cognition arises (...)
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  9. Good deeds and hard knocks: The effect of past suffering on praise for moral behavior.Philip Robbins, Fernando Alvear & Paul Litton - 2021 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 97.
    Are judgments of praise for moral behavior modulated by knowledge of an agent's past suffering at the hands of others, and if so, in what direction? Drawing on multiple lines of research in experimental social psychology, we identify three hypotheses about the psychology of praise — typecasting, handicapping, and non-historicism — each of which supports a different answer to the question above. Typecasting predicts that information about past suffering will augment perceived patiency and thereby diminish perceived agency, making altruistic actions (...)
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  10. Deformative experience: Explaining the effects of adversity on moral evaluation.Philip Robbins & Fernando Alvear - 2023 - Social Cognition 41 (5):415-446.
    Recent research suggests that moral behavior attracts more praise, and immoral behavior less blame, when the agent has suffered in childhood. In this paper we report results from three studies in which a fictional character’s childhood was described in terms of either neglect and abuse (Adversity condition), love and care (Prosperity condition), or neutrally (Control condition). In Study 1 (N = 248), participants in the Adversity condition attributed more praise to a fictional character relative to other conditions. In Study 2 (...)
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  11. Moral Theory.Douglas W. Portmore - manuscript
    This is the first chapter of a book that I'm writing entitled Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends. The chapter has six sections: (1) The Distinction between a Moral Theory and a Complete Account of Morality, (2) The Best Explanation, (3) Fitting the Data as Opposed to the Facts, (4) Epistemic Justification and Phenomenal Conservatism, (5) Neither Overfitting nor Underfitting the Data, and (6) Trusting Our Moral Intuitions. Thus, the chapter begins by providing an account of what a moral theory is (...)
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  12. The Folk Concept of the Good Life: Neither Happiness nor Well-Being.Markus Kneer & Dan Haybron - manuscript
    The concept of a good life is usually assumed by philosophers to be equivalent to that of well-being, or perhaps of a morally good life, and hence has received little attention as a potentially distinct subject matter. In a series of experiments participants were presented with vignettes involving socially sanctioned wrongdoing toward outgroup members. Findings indicated that, for a large majority, judgments of bad character strongly reduce ascriptions of the good life, while having no impact at all on ascriptions of (...)
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  13. Responsibility Gaps and Retributive Dispositions: Evidence from the US, Japan and Germany.Markus Kneer & Markus Christen - manuscript
    Danaher (2016) has argued that increasing robotization can lead to retribution gaps: Situation in which the normative fact that nobody can be justly held responsible for a harmful outcome stands in conflict with our retributivist moral dispositions. In this paper, we report a cross-cultural empirical study based on Sparrow’s (2007) famous example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime, which was conducted with participants from the US, Japan and Germany. We find that (i) people manifest a considerable willingness (...)
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  14. Taking the Morality Out of Happiness.Markus Kneer & Dan Haybron - manuscript
    In an important and widely discussed series of studies, Jonathan Phillips and colleagues have suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness has a substantial moral component. For in- stance, two persons who enjoy the same extent of positive emotions and are equally satisfied with their lives are judged as happy to different degrees if one is less moral than the other. Considering that the relation between morality and happiness or self-interest has been one of the central questions of moral philosophy (...)
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  15. Outcome effects, moral luck and the hindsight bias.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer & Izabela Skoczen - 2022 - Cognition 232 (C):105258.
    In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven (...)
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  16. A plea for integrated empirical and philosophical research on the impacts of feminized AI workers.Hannah Read, Javier Gomez-Lavin, Andrea Beltrama & Lisa Miracchi Titus - 2022 - Analysis (1):89-97.
    Feminist philosophers have long emphasized the ways in which women’s oppression takes a variety of forms depending on complex combinations of factors. These include women’s objectification, dehumanization and unjust gendered divisions of labour caused in part by sexist ideologies regarding women’s social role. This paper argues that feminized artificial intelligence (feminized AI) poses new and important challenges to these perennial feminist philosophical issues. Despite the recent surge in theoretical and empirical attention paid to the ethics of AI in general, a (...)
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  17. Capable but Amoral? Comparing AI and Human Expert Collaboration in Ethical Decision Making.Suzanne Tolmeijer, Markus Christen, Serhiy Kandul, Markus Kneer & Abraham Bernstein - 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 Chi Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 160:160:1–17.
    While artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly applied for decision-making processes, ethical decisions pose challenges for AI applications. Given that humans cannot always agree on the right thing to do, how would ethical decision-making by AI systems be perceived and how would responsibility be ascribed in human-AI collaboration? In this study, we investigate how the expert type (human vs. AI) and level of expert autonomy (adviser vs. decider) influence trust, perceived responsibility, and reliance. We find that participants consider humans to be (...)
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  18. Morality meters and their impacts on moral choices in videogames: a qualitative study.Paul Formosa, Malcolm Ryan, Stephanie Howarth, Jane Messer & Mitchell McEwan - 2022 - Games and Culture 17 (1):89-121.
    Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built (...)
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  19. Metaethical intuitions in lay concepts of normative uncertainty.Maximilian Theisen - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Even if we know all relevant descriptive facts about an act, we can still be uncertain about its moral acceptability. Most literature on how to act under such normative uncertainty operates on moral realism, the metaethical view that there are objective moral facts. Lay people largely report anti-realist intuitions, which poses the question of how these intuitions affect their interpretation and handling of normative uncertainty. Results from two quasi-experimental studies (total N = 365) revealed that most people did not interpret (...)
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  20. Recognition of intrinsic values of sentient beings explains the sense of moral duty towards global nature conservation.Tianxiang Lan, Neil Sinhababu & Luis Roman Carrasco - 2022 - PLoS ONE 10 (17):NA.
    Whether nature is valuable on its own (intrinsic values) or because of the benefits it provides to humans (instrumental values) has been a long-standing debate. The concept of relational values has been proposed as a solution to this supposed dichotomy, but the empirical validation of its intuitiveness remains limited. We experimentally assessed whether intrinsic/relational values of sentient beings/non-sentient beings/ecosystems better explain people’s sense of moral duty towards global nature conservation for the future. Participants from a representative sample of the population (...)
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  21. An empirical perspective on moral expertise: Evidence from a global study of philosophers.Yarden Niv & Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan - 2022 - Bioethics 36 (9):926-935.
    Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in (...)
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  22. The philosophy of luck and experimental philosophy.Joe Milburn & Edouard Machery - 2019 - In Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck. Routledge.
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  23. Folk moral objectivism.Thomas Pölzler - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Philosophers have long debated whether morality is objective. But how do lay people think about this matter? Folk Moral Objectivism: Volume 1, A Philosophical Perspective discusses the philosophical aspects of this question in an accessible, integrated and coherent way. The first part argues that many empirical studies have been unsuccessful in fully or exclusively measuring beliefs about moral objectivity. Still, there are a few lessons that can be drawn from them. Most importantly, lay people are not objectivists.
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  24. What experiments can teach us about justice and impartiality: vindicating experimental political philosophy.Aurélien Allard & Florian Cova - forthcoming - In Hugo Viciana, Fernando Aguiar & Antonio Gaitán (eds.), Issues in Experimental Moral Philosophy. Routledge.
    While psychologists and political scientists have long investigated issues of interest to philosophers, the development of political experimental philosophy has remained limited. This slow progress is surprising, given that political philosophers commonly acknowledge the relevance of empirical data for normative theorizing. In this chapter, we illustrate the importance of empirical data by outlining recent developments in three domains related to theories of justice, where empirical results reinforce or endanger popular philosophical theories. Our first showcase concerns the boundaries of the concept (...)
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  25. The varying rationality of weakness of the will: an empirical investigation and its challenges for a unified theory of rationality.Michael Https://Orcidorg Messerli, Julian Fink & Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-23.
    Weakness of the will remains a perplexing issue. Though philosophers have made substantial progress in homing in on what counts as a weak will, there is little agreement on whether weakness of the will is irrational, and if so, why. In this paper, we take an empirical approach towards the rationality of weakness of the will. After introducing the philosophical debate, we present the results of an empirical study that reveals that people take a “dual sensitivity”, as we shall put (...)
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  26. Extremists are more confident.Nora Heinzelmann & Viet Tran - 2022 - Erkenntnis.
    Metacognitive mental states are mental states about mental states. For example, I may be uncertain whether my belief is correct. In social discourse, an interlocutor’s metacognitive certainty may constitute evidence about the reliability of their testimony. For example, if a speaker is certain that their belief is correct, then we may take this as evidence in favour of their belief, or its content. This paper argues that, if metacognitive certainty is genuine evidence, then it is disproportionate evidence for extreme beliefs. (...)
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  27. Bias towards the future.Kristie Miller, Preston Greene, Andrew J. Latham, James Norton, Christian Tarsney & Hannah Tierney - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (8):e12859.
    All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists contend, (...)
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  28. There’s No Time Like the Present: Present-Bias, Temporal Attitudes and Temporal Ontology.Natalja Deng, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2020 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), The Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
    This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) (...)
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  29. Ethics, X-Phi, and the Expanded Methodological Toolbox: How the Think Aloud Method and Interview Reveal People’s Judgments on Issues in Ethics and Beyond.Kyle Thompson - 2019 - Dissertation, Claremont Graduate University
    Ethics isn’t a conversation exclusive to philosophers. There is value, then, in not only understanding how laypeople think about issues in ethics, but also bringing their judgments into dialogue with those of philosophers in order to make sense of agreement, disagreement, and the consequences of each. Experimental philosophers facilitate this dialogue uniquely by capturing laypeople’s judgments and analyzing them in light of philosophical theory. They have done so almost exclusively by using face valid quantitative surveys about philosophically interesting thought experiments. (...)
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  30. Not More than a Feeling.Kevin Reuter, Michael Messerli & Luca Barlassina - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (1):41-50.
    Affect-based theorists and life satisfaction theorists disagree about the nature of happiness, but agree about this methodological principle: a philosophical theory of happiness should be in line with the folk concept HAPPINESS. In this article, we present two empirical studies indicating that it is affect-based theories that get the folk concept HAPPINESS right: competent speakers judge a person to be happy if and only if that person is described as feeling pleasure/good most of the time. Our studies also show that (...)
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  31. Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer & Ivar R. Https://orcidorg357X Hannikainen - 2022 - Cognition and Emotion 36 (1):137-153.
    At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not (...)
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  32. Moral Rightness Comes in Degrees.Martin Peterson - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (4):645-664.
    This article questions the traditional view that moral rightness and wrongness are discrete predicates with sharp boundaries. I contend that moral rightness and wrongness come in degrees: Some acts are somewhat rightandsomewhat wrong. My argument is based on the assumption that meaning tracks use. If an overwhelming majority of competent language users frequently say that some acts are a bit right and a bit wrong, this indicates that rightness and wrongnessaregradable concepts. To support the empirical part of the argument I (...)
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  33. The Deceiving Game.Shlomo Cohen & Ro'I. Zultan - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (4):453-473.
    The moral comparison of the three venues of deception—lying, falsely implicating, and nonverbal deception—is a central, ongoing debate in the ethics of deception. To date there has been no attempt to advance in the debate through experimental philosophy. Using methods of experimental economics, we devised a strategic game to test positions in the debate. Our article presents the experimental results and shows how philosophical analysis of the results allows drawing valid normative conclusions. Our conclusions testify against the dominant position in (...)
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  34. Children's and adults' views of punishment as a path to redemption.James Dunlea & Larisa Heiphetz - forthcoming - Child Development.
    The current work investigated the extent to which children (N=171 6- to 8-year-olds) and adults (N = 94) view punishment as redemptive. In Study 1, children—but not adults—reported that “mean” individuals became “nicer” after one severe form of punishment (incarceration). Moreover, adults expected “nice” individuals’ moral character to worsen following punishment; however, we did not find that children expected such a change. Study 2 extended these findings by showing that children view “mean” individuals as becoming “nicer” following both severe (incarceration) (...)
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  35. Playing the Blame Game with Robots.Markus Kneer & Michael T. Stuart - 2021 - In Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’21 Companion). New York, NY, USA:
    Recent research shows – somewhat astonishingly – that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]–[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral- psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an AI system (...)
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  36. The worst-motive fallacy: A negativity bias in motive attribution.Joel Walmsley & O'Madagain Cathal - 2020 - Psychological Science 31 (11):1430--1438.
    In this article, we describe a hitherto undocumented fallacy-in the sense of a mistake in reasoning-constituted by a negativity bias in the way that people attribute motives to others. We call this the "worst-motive fallacy," and we conducted two experiments to investigate it. In Experiment 1, participants expected protagonists in a variety of fictional vignettes to pursue courses of action that satisfy the protagonists' worst motive, and furthermore, participants significantly expected the protagonist to pursue a worse course of action than (...)
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  37. Why don't we trust moral testimony?James Andow - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (4):456-474.
    Is there a problem with believing based on moral testimony? The intuition that there is a problem is a starting point for much research on moral testimony. To arbitrate between various attempts to account for intuitions about moral testimony, we need to know the exact nature of those intuitions. The current study investigates this empirically. The study confirms an asymmetry in the way we think about testimony about moral and descriptive matters and explores the extent to which this asymmetry is (...)
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  38. A double causal contrast theory of moral intuitions in trolley dilemmas.Michael R. Waldmann & Alex Wiegmann - 2010 - In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 2589--2594.
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  39. Scientific Study of Morals.Maria Gräfenhain & Alex Wiegmann - 2013 - In Christopher Luetege (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Springer. pp. 1477--1501.
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  40. Transfer effects between moral dilemmas: A causal model theory.Alex Wiegmann & Michael R. Waldmann - 2014 - Cognition 131 (1):28-43.
  41. Order effects in moral judgment.Alex Wiegmann, Yasmina Okan & Jonas Nagel - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (6):813-836.
    Explaining moral intuitions is one of the hot topics of recent cognitive science. In the present article we focus on a factor that attracted surprisingly little attention so far, namely the temporal order in which moral scenarios are presented. We argue that previous research points to a systematic pattern of order effects that has been overlooked until now: only judgments of actions that are normally regarded as morally acceptable are susceptible to be affected by the order of presentation, and this (...)
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Experimental Philosophy: Bioethics
  1. Advance Medical Decision-Making Differs Across First- and Third-Person Perspectives.James Toomey, Jonathan Lewis, I. Hannikainen & Brian Earp - forthcoming - AJOB Empirical Bioethics.
    Background: Advance healthcare decision-making presumes that a prior treatment preference expressed with sufficient mental capacity ("T1 preference") should trump a contrary preference expressed after significant cognitive decline ("T2 preference"). This assumption is much debated in normative bioethics, but little is known about lay judgments in this domain. This study investigated participants' judgments about which preference should be followed, and whether these judgments differed depending on a first-person (deciding for one's future self) versus third-person (deciding for a friend or stranger) perspective.
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  2. Applying the ecosystem approach to global bioethics: building on the Leopold legacy.Antoine Boudreau LeBlanc & Bryn Williams-Jones - 2023 - Global Bioethics 34 (1):2280289.
    For Van Rensselaer Potter (1911–2001), Global Bio-Ethics is about building on the legacy of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), one of the most notable forest managers of the twentieth century who brought to light the importance of pragmatism in the sciences and showed us a new way to proceed with environmental ethics. Following Richard Huxtable and Jonathan Ives's methodological 'Framework for Empirical Bioethics Research Projects' called 'Mapping, framing, shaping,' published in BMC Medicine Ethics (2019)), we propose operationalizing a framework for Global Bio-Ethics (...)
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  3. Partial Aggregation: What the People Think.Markus Kneer & Juri Viehoff - manuscript
    This article applies the tools of experimental philosophy to the ongoing debate about both the theoretical viability and the practical import of partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics. We conduct a series of three experiments (N=383): First, we document the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate this position. Our study then moves beyond establishing the existence of partially aggregative intuitions in two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work in such a way as to ascertain which amongst existing versions (...)
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  4. The needs of the many: Exploring associations of personality with third-party judgments of public health-related utilitarian rule violations.Alexander Behnke, Diana Armbruster & Anja Strobel - 2023 - PLoS ONE 18 (4):e0284558.
    Safeguarding the rights of minorities is crucial for just societies. However, there are conceivable situations where minority rights might seriously impede the rights of the majority. Favoring the minority in such cases constitutes a violation of utilitarian principles. To explore the emotional, cognitive, and punitive responses of observers of such utilitarian rule transgressions, we conducted an online study with 1004 participants. Two moral scenarios (vaccine policy and epidemic) were rephrased in the third-party perspective. In both public health-related scenarios, the protagonist (...)
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  5. Justification of principles for healthcare priority setting: the relevance and roles of empirical studies exploring public values.Erik Gustavsson & Lars Lindblom - 2023 - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    How should scarce healthcare resources be distributed? This is a contentious issue that became especially pressing during the pandemic. It is often emphasised that studies exploring public views about this question provide valuable input to the issue of healthcare priority setting. While there has been a vast number of such studies it is rarely articulated, more specifically, what the results from these studies would mean for the justification of principles for priority setting. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable that (...)
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  6. Normality and the Treatment-Enhancement Distinction.Daniel Martín, Jon Rueda, Brian D. Earp & Ivar R. Hannikainen - 2023 - Neuroethics 16 (2):1-14.
    There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., “enhancement”—for example, use of a psychostimulant as a “study drug”), people often express greater hesitation. (...)
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  7. Moral Judgments Impact Perceived Risks From COVID-19 Exposure.Cailin O'Connor - 2023 - Collabra: Psychology 9 (1):74793.
    The COVID-19 pandemic created enormously difficult decisions for individuals trying to navigate both the risks of the pandemic and the demands of everyday life. Good decision making in such scenarios can have life and death consequences. For this reason, it is important to understand what drives risk assessments during a pandemic, and to investigate the ways that these assessments might deviate from ideal risk assessments. In a preregistered online study of U.S. residents (N = 841) using two blocks of vignettes (...)
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  8. Effects of perspective switching and utilitarian thinking on moral judgments in a sacrificial dilemma among healthcare and non-healthcare students.Junsu Park, Yongmin Shin, Seungmin Kim, Seho Maeng & Jungjoon Ihm - 2023 - Current Psychology.
    During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals have often faced moral challenges, which required them to choose between endorsing self- or other-sacrifice for the greater good. Drawing on the altruistic rationalization hypothesis and trait-activation theory, this study investigates (a) whether healthcare students’ endorsement of utilitarian solutions to sacrificial moral dilemmas varies when they are confronted with the minority group, majority group, or third-person perspective on the given dilemma and (b) whether individual differences in utilitarian thinking, as measured by the Oxford Utilitarianism (...)
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  9. Has the Socio-Political Role of Neuroethics Been Neglected?Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2022 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 13 (1):23-25.
    Alongside the rapid global advances in neuroscientific research, neuroethics has been one of the fastest growing sub-fields within bioethics. With this rapid expansion, bioethicists struggle to kee...
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