Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral (...) judgments in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation. (shrink)

Appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy are challenged by experimental philosophers and other critics. A common response to experimental philosophical criticisms is to hold that only professional philosophers? intuitions count as evidence in philosophy. This ?expert intuitions defence? is inadequate for two reasons. First, recent studies indicate significant variability in professional philosophers? intuitions. Second, the academic literature on professional intuitions gives us reasons to doubt that professional philosophers develop truth-apt intuitions. The onus falls on those who mount the (...) expert intuitions defence to meet these objections because it is implicitly being claimed that training and practice caused professional philosophers to acquire reliably accurate intuitions and we are owed an account of how this transformation takes place. A possible response to this situation is to attempt to reform philosophical practice to improve the quality of intuitions. Another possible response, advocated here, is to avoid appeals to intuitions as evidence. (shrink)

We asked college students to make judgments about realistic moral situations presented as dilemmas (which asked for an either/or decision) vs. problems (which did not ask for such a decision) as well as when the situation explicitly included affectively salient language vs. non-affectively salient language. We report two main findings. The first is that there are four different types of cognitive strategy that subjects use in their responses: simple reasoning, intuitive judging, cautious reasoning, and empathic reasoning. We give operational (...) definitions of these types in terms of our observed data. In addition, the four types characterized strategies not only in the whole sample, but also in all of the subsamples in our study. The second finding is that the intuitive judging type comprised approximately 26% of our respondents, while about 74% of our respondents employed one of the three styles of reasoning named above. We think that these findings present an interesting challenge to models of moral cognition which predict that there is either a single, or a single most common, strategy – especially a strategy of relying upon one’s intuitions – that people use to think about moral situations. (shrink)

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main (...) theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issues about grammatical intuitions in a programmatic sketch. The first part deals with epistemology of such intuitions and defends a moderate Voice-of-competence view in discussion with Michael Devitt, the ordinarist, who sees them as products of general intelligence or Central Processing Unit. The second part deals with the problem for their validity and offers a compromise solution: linguistic intuitions are valid because their object the standard linguistic entities, are production- and response-dependent. Competence does dictate what (...) is correct, and what is not, the order of determination goes from the internal to the external, or external-seeming language items. An external token string has linguistic properties because it would be interpreted as having them by the normal language-hearer and would be produced by a process that would form it respecting the nature of these properties. The solution is briefly situated on the map of general response-dependentism. (shrink)

We are often, as agents, responsible for the things we do and say. This responsibility can come in a number of different forms: here I propose and defend a view of how we are epistemically responsible for our actions and assertions. In other normative areas, we can be responsible for our actions when those actions violate a norm (for example, we can be morally responsible when we violate some moral norm). I argue that we can similarly be epistemically responsible when (...) we violate a norm of assertion or action, norms that tell us how epistemically well-positioned we need to be towards a proposition in order to assert it or treat it as a reason for acting. I first defend a structure of epistemic norms that allows for the possibility of epistemic responsibility, and then propose a notion of epistemic responsibility itself. -/- We can, and do, evaluate actions and assertions in a specifically epistemic way: we judge that someone should not have acted on the basis of unreliable information, that someone should not have asserted something they knew was false, etc. These kinds of evaluations lead us to believe that proper action and assertion have some basic epistemic requirements, what are called norms of assertion and action. In order to defend a notion of epistemic responsibility, I first establish a general claim about the ways that we make epistemic evaluations in relation to these norms. Many who argue for a particular epistemic norm of action or assertion endorse what I call epistemic monism, the view that all epistemic evaluations of actions or assertions must be explained solely in terms of whether they have adhered to their respective norm. I argue that epistemic monism is false. Instead, I defend epistemic separability, the view that we make two different kinds of epistemic evaluations: one that pertains to whether one has adhered to an epistemic norm, and one that pertains to whether one has reason to think they are adhering to or violating the relevant norm. In my defense of epistemic separability I appeal to arguments from luminosity failure – the claim that for any given epistemic relationship we can have with a proposition we can have good reason to believe that we fail to be in it – and empirical arguments that show that we only have fallible access to our own mental states. These arguments show that we can violate an epistemic norm while having good reason to think otherwise and, in turn, shows that we can be evaluated not only in terms of whether we have adhered to or violated that norm, but also in terms of whether we are responsible for doing so. I argue that whether one’s action is epistemically responsible depends on whether one fulfils the epistemic commitments one makes in performing that action. These commitments consist in being able to provide reasons to believe that one has adhered to the norm governing the action one performs, according to a standard imposed by the situation in which one acts. Thus in more epistemically demanding situations – those in which there are high expectations that we be able to show that we have adhered to the relevant epistemic norm – it will be more difficult to act in an epistemically responsible way. Accepting a notion of epistemic responsibility (and, with it, rejecting epistemic monism) has significant consequences for a number of current debates in epistemology. The first pertains to the debate concerning the correct epistemic norm of assertion and practical reasoning. Many proposed norms are argued to be inadequate on the basis of an inability to explain intuitive epistemic evaluations solely in terms of the conditions set forth in the norms. Epistemic separability, however, implies that the structure of this dialectic is misguided, as we can perhaps accommodate problematic judgments in terms of evaluations of responsibility. The second consequence pertains to arguments for contemporary theories of knowledge. Again, such theories are judged by their ability to accommodate intuitive attributions of knowledge. However, I argue that many of the evaluations that serve as the basis for such theories are better interpreted not as judgments about whether one has knowledge, but as judgments about whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. Recognizing a notion of epistemically responsible action thus calls into question both the plausibility of a number of contemporary theories of knowledge, as well as the way in which we go about doing epistemology in general. (shrink)

Intellectualism encompasses a range of positions which all share a commitment to the view that all know‐how can be rendered as know‐that. The starting point for Luntley's account arises from his response to the highly influential Dreyfus and Dreyfus phenomenological model of expertise which charts the path from novice to expert. According to the model, formal instruction starts with rules but they seem to give way to more flexible responses as one approaches expertise. The model claims that expertise is (...) a matter of discriminating perception which enables an appropriate response to the richness of the context thereby permitting the successful intuitive situational response that is the hallmark of expertise. The range and complexity of expert knowledge requires a proliferation of types of knowledge, postulating such proliferation would be a serious philosophical error. For Luntley the model of expertise treats the discriminating perception typical of many sorts of expertise. (shrink)

In 2008 a young man committed suicide while his webcam was running. 1,500 people apparently watched as the young man lay dying: when people finally made an effort to call the police, it was too late. This closely resembles the case of Kitty Genovese in 1964, where 39 neighbours supposedly watched an attacker assault and did not call until it was too late. This paper examines the role of internet mediation in cases where people may or may not have been (...) good Samaritans and what their responsibilities were. The method is an intuitive one: intuitions on the various potentially morally relevant differences when it comes to responsibility between offline and online situations are examined. The number of onlookers, their physical nearness and their anonymity have no moral relevance when it comes to holding them responsible. Their perceived reality of the situation and ability to act do have an effect on whether we can hold people responsible, but this doesn’t seem to be unique to internet mediation. However the way in which those factors are intrinsically connected to internet mediation does seem to have a diminishing effect on responsibility in online situations. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, it will be increasingly involved in novel, morally significant situations. Thus, understanding what it means for a machine to be morally responsible is important for machine ethics. Any method for ascribing moral responsibility to AI must be intelligible and intuitive to the humans who interact with it. We argue that the appropriate approach is to determine how AIs might fare on a standard account of human moral responsibility: a Strawsonian account. We make no claim (...) that our Strawsonian approach is either the only one worthy of consideration or the obviously correct approach, but we think it is preferable to trying to marry fundamentally different ideas of moral responsibility into a single cohesive account. Under a Strawsonian framework, people are morally responsible when they are appropriately subject to a particular set of attitudes—reactive attitudes—and determine under what conditions it might be appropriate to subject machines to this same set of attitudes. Although the Strawsonian account traditionally applies to individual humans, it is plausible that entities that are not individual humans but possess these attitudes are candidates for moral responsibility under a Strawsonian framework. We conclude that weak AI is never morally responsible, while a strong AI with the right emotional capacities may be morally responsible. (shrink)

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance (...) to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud. (shrink)

One of the hallmarks of virtue is reliably acting well. Such reliable success presupposes that an agent is able to recognize the morally salient features of a situation, and the appropriate response to those features and is motivated to act on this knowledge without internal conflict. Furthermore, it is often claimed that the virtuous person can do this in a spontaneous or intuitive manner. While these claims represent an ideal of what it is to have a virtue, it (...) is less clear how to make good on them. That is, how is it actually possible to spontaneously and reliably act well? In this paper, we will lay out a framework for understanding how it is that one could reliably act well in an intuitive manner. We will do this by developing the concept of an action schema, which draws on the philosophical and psychological literature on skill acquisition and self-regulation. In short, we will give an account of how self-regulation, grounded in skillful structures, can allow for the accurate intuitions and flexible expertise required for virtue. While our primary goal in this paper is to provide a positive theory of how virtuous intuitions might be accounted for, we also take ourselves to be raising the bar for what counts as an explanation of reliable and intuitive action in general. (shrink)

The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to (...) luck than is compatibilism. But compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection: historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck; non-historical compatibilisms run into insurmountable difficulties with the epistemic condition on control over action. Levy argues that because epistemic conditions on control are so demanding that they are rarely satisfied, agents are not blameworthy for performing actions that they take to be best in a given situation. It follows that if there are any actions for which agents are responsible, they are akratic actions; but even these are unacceptably subject to luck. Levy goes on to discuss recent non-historical compatibilisms, and argues that they do not offer a viable alternative to control-based compatibilisms. He suggests that luck undermines our freedom and moral responsibility no matter whether determinism is true or not. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory of Health has been the main contender among naturalistic accounts of health for the last 40 years. Yet, a recent criticism of this theory, presented by Elselijn Kingma, identifies a dilemma resulting from the BST’s conceptual linking of health and statistical typicality. Kingma argues that the BST either cannot accommodate the situation- specificity of many normal functions or cannot account for many situation-specific diseases. In this article, we expand upon with Daniel Hausman’s response to Kingma’s (...) dilemma. We propose that recalling Boorse’s specification that health is an intrinsic property of its bearers and explicating this intrinsic property in relation to the concept of homeostasis can illuminate how proponents of naturalistic accounts of health should deal with the situation- specificity of normal functions. We argue that beyond what Boorse and Hausman have delineated, the situation- specificity of normal function cannot be fully captured in a simple dichotomy between normal and abnormal environment or between relevant and irrelevant situations. By bringing homeostasis to the fore of the analysis of health, we set out a richer picture of what the various situations that affect living organisms’ functional performance can be. Accordingly, we provide a broader classification of these various situations which, we contend, better accounts for the main intuitions that philosophers of medicine have sought to accommodate than previous naturalistic theories of health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Multiple Personality and Moral ResponsibilityStephen E. Braude (bio)AbstractThe philosophical literature on multiple personality has focused primarily on problems about personal identity and psychological explanation. But multiple personality and other dissociative phenomena raise equally important and even more urgent questions about moral responsibility, in particular: In what respect(s) and to what extent should a multiple be held responsible for the actions of his/her alternate personalities? Cases of dreaming help illustrate (...) why attributions of responsibility in cases of dissociation do not turn on putative changes in identity, as some have supposed. Instead, it is argued that traditional criteria of rationality and behavioral control apply also to cases of dissociation. It is noted, however, that one can distinguish different kinds of responsibility in cases of dissociation, and that one is responsible for one’s dreams in a different sense from that in which one is responsible for actions one can control and evaluate. It is also argued that in cases of multiple personality it is important to distinguish control over switching of personalities from an alter’s control over its own behavior. Moreover, the author considers reasons for thinking that amnesia is less relevant to attributions of responsibility than many have supposed.Keywordsdissociation, dreaming, rationality, amnesiaIntroductionThe philosophical literature on MPD/DID 1 has focused primarily on problems about personhood, personal identity, and the nature of psychological explanation. Presumably, that is because multiples appear to be (or to harbor) more than one person or more than one distinct moral or prudential agent. But philosophers have had almost nothing to say about problems of responsibility in these cases—in particular, the question: In what respect(s) and to what extent should a multiple be held responsible for the actions of his/her alternate personalities (or alters)?Unlike questions about personhood and identity, this question is not simply an abstract matter that we may ponder at our leisure. Clinicians treating multiples must decide whether it is appropriate—or even just therapeutically beneficial—to hold their patients (or specific alters) responsible for behaviors which they seem unable to control or remember. Similarly, and with increasing frequency, our courts must decide whether a defendant claiming to be a multiple may be held guilty for the actions of one or more alters. In fact, the legal issues can be quite dramatic, and even bizarre. Consider: What sort of individual is standing trial? An alter or the multiple as a whole? Should courts accept the claim that the subject being questioned on the stand is not the same as the subject who committed the crime? If so, other questions come immediately to mind. For example, would it be appropriate for each alter of a criminal defendant to have separate legal council?Undoubtedly, some will have trouble taking that last question seriously. But no matter how [End Page 37] clear its solution may appear to one’s moral or legal intuitions, those intuitions are seldom as straightforward as they seem. Indeed, one cannot explain or defend them without taking a stand, at least provisionally, on a wide range of thorny philosophical problems. Moreover, the aforementioned questions are merely the tip of the iceberg, and our answers to them have implications extending beyond the courtroom. For example, with regard to forensic contexts Slovenko (1991) asks,Should a search or arrest warrant be issued for each personality? Must a Miranda warning be given to each personality of a suspect with MPD? May the other personalities exclude evidence on the ground that they were not properly read their rights at the time of the arrest? Would each one of the personalities have to waive his or her rights, or would one waiver be sufficient? Does the doctrine of double jeopardy bar the trial of a personality when another has been put to trial? Must each personality testifying at trial be sworn in and administered the oath?(22, 25)These questions have obvious analogues in clinical situations, and also in personal contexts, say, between friends or members of a family, one of whom is a multiple. For example, to what extent should a DID patient be held responsible for the sociopathic (or simply counter-therapeutic) behavior of... (shrink)

Even among those who find lethal defense against non-responsible threats, innocent aggressors, or justified aggressors justified even in one to one cases, there is a debate as to what the best explanation of this permissibility is. The contenders in this debate are the liability account, which holds that the non-responsible or justified human targets of the defensive measures are liable to attack, and the justified infringement account, which claims that the targets retain their right not to be attacked but may (...) be attacked anyway, even in one to one situations. Given that we normally think that rights are trumps, this latter claim is counter-intuitive and rather surprising, and therefore in need of justification and explanation. So far only Jonathan Quong has actually tried to provide an explanation; however, I will argue that his explanation fails and that Quong’s own account of liability is misguided. I then address Helen Frowe’s critique of the liability account. She makes the important concession that the tactical bomber has to compensate his victims, but she tries to block the conclusion that he must therefore be liable. I will demonstrate that her attempt to explain away liability fails once that concession is made. (shrink)

This paper aims to specify the precise conditions under which an agent is responsible for inequalities. Admittedly, the careful examination of the conditions in question has been the main focus of contemporary egalitarianism. As a matter of fact, contemporary political philosophers take responsibility to be a core conception which in principle justifies inequalities. In particular, they tend to flesh out the conception of responsibility in terms of choice, in such a way that we should hold individuals responsible for chosen inequalities (...) but not for unchosen inequalities. This core idea is intuitively appealing because, on the one hand, alleviation of inequalities that people do not choose would thereby be encouraged, and on the other hand, it avoids an egalitarian ‘moral hazard’: the situation in which people need care nothing for the consequences (economic or otherwise) of their own choice. G. A. Cohen thus goes so far as to say that egalitarianism successfully incorporates “within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.”. (shrink)

In everyday life we assume substantial behavioural reliability in others, and on the basis of it we talk of people as acting “in character” and “out of character”. This common assumption seems intuitively well founded. But recent experiments in social psychology have generated philosophical controversy around it. In the context of this debate, John Doris challenges Aristotle’s well known and influential view that people’s behavioural reliability with respect to acting virtuously is underpinned by character traits, understood as settled and integrated (...) dispositions of the agent to have appropriate judgment and appropriate feelings toward what she is called upon to do in a given situation. In this paper I will take John Doris’ challenge at face value, and argue in response that Aristotle’s position is not undermined by it. In fact, rethinking Aristotle’s realism about character and moral virtues in light of Doris’ criticism has important and hitherto unexplored heuristic value for Aristotelian scholars and situationist philosophers alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Estelle R. Jorgensen, “Four Philosophical Models of the Relationship Between Theory and Practice”W. Ann StokesEstelle Jorgensen has written a most interesting paper contrasting four different concepts of the relationship between theory and practice, and pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each. Each approach introduces insights that the others have missed, but is not sufficient in itself to explain all the relationships between theory and practice. (...) In response to the concept of "dichotomy," I am also sympathetic to the attempt to distinguish practice and theory because it identifies two important constituents of experience, and it provides a fruitful way of investigating the relationship between the two concepts. However, I believe that a concept of dichotomy may put the two categoriees in too distant a relationship with each other. This distance may prevent us from recognizing the "interconnections and cross-fertilizations" that are often possible between them.The idea of "polarity" opens up the possibility of focusing on the ground [End Page 102] between the two concepts. It also provides a framework for allowing "practice to bubble up into theory," and "theory to bubble up into practice." Given that a theory may bring about a range of different practices and that practices may be based upon a range of differing theories, one needs to be able to move easily between the two worlds. Imagination, intuition, and rational thinking all contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the two concepts. In this situation of polarity one should not expect to find "a theory perfectly translated into a particular practice, or a practice drawing entirely and fully on one particular theory."I am also sympathetic to the view that "theory without practice is mentalism," and that "practice without theory is activism or instrumentalism bare of guiding principles," but like Jorgensen I find the concept of fusion the least helpful of the four concepts. Given the fact that very rarely (if ever) is theory perfectly exemplified in practice, or practice based solely upon one specific theory, the concept of fusion in many instances is too absolute. I am open to the suggestion that moral principles as well as aesthetic ones should guide the practice of music education despite the difficulties that a multiplicity of perspectives opens up. I also agree that democratic ideals can offer us one way of guiding the decisions made in the classroom and can offer a rallying point for persons coming from different ethnic, religious, political, and cultural backgrounds.The dialectical approach opens up a way to negotiate among differences of opinion and beliefs that influence practice. It assumes that there is no one perfect perspective on the relationship between theory and practice. The dialectical approach provides (1)a framework to investigate the theories and practices of which practitioners are aware, (2)opportunities to examine how practitioners adjudicate them, and (3)explanations of how and why they decide to act "in their particular lived situations." In contrast to the ontological approach, I like Jorgensen's epistemological approach to the investigation of theory and practice. It offers another perspective in addition to the influence that ontological theories can have in guiding music education practice.My view of the ideal relationship between theory and practice is one that acknowledges the differences between the two concepts, but allows for a variety of relationships between the two. It is one that recognizes that theory should influence practice and that practice should influence theory in an ongoing and continuous reciprocal exchange. It entails being sensitive to a variety of theories and particular practices, and being skilled at being able to pick which particular theory or theories best explains the practice observed.In addition to the concepts of dichotomy, polarity, fusion, and dialectic, another possible concept of the relationship between theory and practice might be based upon Michael Lewis, Margaret Sullivan, and Linda Michalson's view [End Page 103] of the "cognitive-emotional fugue."1 This perspective has the advantage of being very flexible. The authors describe emotion and cognition as being neither separate nor independent processes. "Rather both are elements of a continuous, inseparable stream of behavior like the parts of a fugue in which the theme is often lost... (shrink)

The article addresses issues at the nexus of physician industrial action, moral agency, and responsibility. There are situations in which we find ourselves best placed to offer aid to those who may be in vulnerable positions, a behavior that is consistent with our everyday moral intuitions. In both our interpersonal relationships and social life, we make frequent judgments about whether to praise or blame someone for their actions when we determine that they should have acted to help a vulnerable person. (...) While the average person is unlikely to confront these kinds of situations often, those in the medical professions, physicians especially, may confront these and similar situations regularly. Therefore, when physicians withhold their services for whatever reason in support of industrial action, it raises issues of moral responsibility to patients who may be in a vulnerable position. Using theories of moral responsibility, vulnerability, and ethics, this paper explores the moral implications of physician industrial action. We explore issues of vulnerability of patients, as well as the moral responsibility and moral agency of doctors to patients. Determining when a person is vulnerable, and when an individual becomes a moral agent, worthy of praise or blame for an act or non-action, is at the core of the framework. Notwithstanding the right of physicians to act in their self-interest, we argue that vulnerability leads to moral obligations, that physicians are moral agents, and the imperatives of their obligations to patients clear, even if limited by certain conditions. We suggest that both doctors and governments have a collective responsibility to prevent harm to patients and present the theoretical and practical implications of the paper. (shrink)

Hawthorne discusses (without endorsing) the following instance of our (T1) , “One knows that one is seeing a desk by taking for granted, but without knowing, that one is not a brain in a vat” (510). We believe that this is a commonsensical way of describing an ordinary situation. Intuitively, one knows one is seeing a desk. Intuitively one is normally justified in taking it for granted that one is not a brain in a vat, but one does not know (...) one isn’t a brain in a vat. (shrink)

Counterfactual theories of causation have had difficulty in delivering the intuitively correct verdicts for cases of causation involving preemption, without generating further counterexamples. Hall has offered a pluralistic theory of causation, according to which there are two concepts of causation: counterfactual dependence and production. Hall’s theory does deliver the correct verdicts for many of the problematic kinds of preemption. It also deals successfully with cases of causation by omission, which have proved stubborn counterexamples to physical process theories of causation. Hall’s (...) theory therefore appears to be a significant improvement on extant univocal theories of causation, both physical and counterfactual. In this paper I present a series of counterexamples to Hall’s theory. I also describe cases in which our causal judgments appear to be sensitive to moral considerations. It does not seem likely that conventional theories of causation, which attempt to situate causation in an objective metaphysical picture of the world, will ever accord our intuitions in such cases. Finally, the notion of responsibility is considered, but rejected as an illuminating primitive for analyzing causation. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to test empirically an idea that many philosophers find intuitive, namely that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. Many philosophers find it intuitive that moral agents are responsible only if they know the particular facts surrounding their action. Our results show that whether moral agents are aware of the facts surrounding their action does have an effect on people’s attributions of blame, regardless of the consequences or side effects of the agent’s actions. In general, (...) it was more likely that a situationally aware agent will be blamed for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. We also tested attributions of forgiveness in addition to attributions of blame. In general, it was less likely that a situationally aware agent will be forgiven for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. When the agent is situationally unaware, it is more likely that the agent will be forgiven than blamed. We argue that these results provide some empirical support for the hypothesis that there is something intuitive about the idea that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. (shrink)

This paper investigates the process of moral agency development as a community-supported process. Based on a multimethod qualitative inquiry, including diaries, focus groups, and documentary analysis, we analyze the experiences of middle managers in two Norwegian hospitals during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that moral agency is developed through a community-embedded value inquiry, emerging in three partially overlapping steps. The first step is marked by moral reflex, an intuitive, value-driven, pre-reflective response to a crisis (...) situation. In the second step, the managers involved the community in value calibration, a collective-ethical sensemaking. In the third step, they took active stances to translate values into actions, with an increased awareness of values and an ability to explain and justify their actions. We label the steps, respectively: value inquiry-in-action, value inquiry-on-action and reflective enactment of value. An analysis of the process reveals two aspects critical for moral agency development: it happens through confrontation with uncertainty, and it is relational, that is, embedded in a community. While uncertainty forces an intuitive moral response, dialogical reflection in the community develops value awareness and relationships of mutual care and support. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow argues that several initially plausible arguments in favor of the deployment of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) in warfare fail, and that their deployment faces a serious moral objection: deploying AWS fails to express the respect for the casualties of war that morality requires. We critically discuss Sparrow’s argument from respect and respond on behalf of some objections he considers. Sparrow’s argument against AWS relies on the claim that they are distinct from accepted weapons of war in that they (...) either fail to transmit an attitude of respect or they transmit an attitude of disrespect. We argue that this distinction between AWS and widely accepted weapons is illusory, and so cannot ground a moral difference between AWS and existing methods of waging war. We also suggest that, if deploying conventional soldiers in some situation would be permissible, and if we could expect deploying AWS to cause fewer civilian casualties, then it would be consistent with an intuitive understanding of respect to deploy AWS in this situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Estelle R. Jorgensen, “Four Philosophical Models of the Relationship Between Theory and Practice”W. Ann StokesEstelle Jorgensen has written a most interesting paper contrasting four different concepts of the relationship between theory and practice, and pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each. Each approach introduces insights that the others have missed, but is not sufficient in itself to explain all the relationships between theory and practice. (...) In response to the concept of "dichotomy," I am also sympathetic to the attempt to distinguish practice and theory because it identifies two important constituents of experience, and it provides a fruitful way of investigating the relationship between the two concepts. However, I believe that a concept of dichotomy may put the two categoriees in too distant a relationship with each other. This distance may prevent us from recognizing the "interconnections and cross-fertilizations" that are often possible between them.The idea of "polarity" opens up the possibility of focusing on the ground [End Page 102] between the two concepts. It also provides a framework for allowing "practice to bubble up into theory," and "theory to bubble up into practice." Given that a theory may bring about a range of different practices and that practices may be based upon a range of differing theories, one needs to be able to move easily between the two worlds. Imagination, intuition, and rational thinking all contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the two concepts. In this situation of polarity one should not expect to find "a theory perfectly translated into a particular practice, or a practice drawing entirely and fully on one particular theory."I am also sympathetic to the view that "theory without practice is mentalism," and that "practice without theory is activism or instrumentalism bare of guiding principles," but like Jorgensen I find the concept of fusion the least helpful of the four concepts. Given the fact that very rarely (if ever) is theory perfectly exemplified in practice, or practice based solely upon one specific theory, the concept of fusion in many instances is too absolute. I am open to the suggestion that moral principles as well as aesthetic ones should guide the practice of music education despite the difficulties that a multiplicity of perspectives opens up. I also agree that democratic ideals can offer us one way of guiding the decisions made in the classroom and can offer a rallying point for persons coming from different ethnic, religious, political, and cultural backgrounds.The dialectical approach opens up a way to negotiate among differences of opinion and beliefs that influence practice. It assumes that there is no one perfect perspective on the relationship between theory and practice. The dialectical approach provides (1)a framework to investigate the theories and practices of which practitioners are aware, (2)opportunities to examine how practitioners adjudicate them, and (3)explanations of how and why they decide to act "in their particular lived situations." In contrast to the ontological approach, I like Jorgensen's epistemological approach to the investigation of theory and practice. It offers another perspective in addition to the influence that ontological theories can have in guiding music education practice.My view of the ideal relationship between theory and practice is one that acknowledges the differences between the two concepts, but allows for a variety of relationships between the two. It is one that recognizes that theory should influence practice and that practice should influence theory in an ongoing and continuous reciprocal exchange. It entails being sensitive to a variety of theories and particular practices, and being skilled at being able to pick which particular theory or theories best explains the practice observed.In addition to the concepts of dichotomy, polarity, fusion, and dialectic, another possible concept of the relationship between theory and practice might be based upon Michael Lewis, Margaret Sullivan, and Linda Michalson's view [End Page 103] of the "cognitive-emotional fugue."1 This perspective has the advantage of being very flexible. The authors describe emotion and cognition as being neither separate nor independent processes. "Rather both are elements of a continuous, inseparable stream of behavior like the parts of a fugue in which the theme is often lost... (shrink)

Despite the rapidly growing literature on realism, there’s little discussion of the ideology critique of John Rawls offered by one of its leading lights, Raymond Geuss. There is little understanding of what (most of) this critique consists in and few discussions of how Rawls’ approach to political theorising may be defended against it. To remedy this situation, this article reconstructs the realist ideology critique of Rawls advanced by Raymond Geuss, which has three prongs: (1) Rawls’ political theory offers insufficient tools (...) to uncover and address distortions of our political values, beliefs, and intuitions; (2) it unacceptably reinforces these distortions by unduly legitimating them; and (3) it diverts attention from important features of real politics. With this done, I finish by considering how Rawlsians can respond, chiefly by employing a kind of reflective equilibrium, or reflective endorsement, broad enough to encompass different forms of genealogy and ideology critique. (shrink)

Dilemma situations involving the choice of which human life to save in the case of unavoidable accidents are expected to arise only rarely in the context of autonomous vehicles. Nonetheless, the scientific community has devoted significant attention to finding appropriate and acceptable automated decisions in the event that AVs or drivers of AVs were indeed to face such situations. Awad and colleagues, in their now famous paper “The Moral Machine Experiment”, used a “multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data (...) on how citizens would want AVs to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents.” Awad and colleagues undoubtedly collected an impressive and philosophically useful data set of armchair intuitions. However, we argue that applying their findings to the development of “global, socially acceptable principles for machine learning” would violate basic tenets of human rights law and fundamental principles of human dignity. To make its arguments, our paper cites principles of tort law, relevant case law, provisions from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and rules from the German Ethics Code for Autonomous and Connected Driving. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Nenad Miščević’s “Reply to Michael Devitt”, the latest in an exchange on the source of linguistic intuitions. Miščević defends a modified version (“MoVoC”) of the received view that these intuitions are the product of a linguistic competence. I have earlier rejected all versions of the received view urging instead that intuitions are, like perceptual judgments, empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena. (1) I emphasize here, against Miščević, that this claim about a speaker’s intuitions (...) about strings is not to be conflated with a claim about her understanding of strings. (2) I develop my claim, addressed by Miščević, that MoVoC is implausible in three ways. But these are not the main problems for MoVoC. For further discussion of those, see Jutronić’s paper in this volume. (shrink)

Because of the increasing number of “man-made” hazards in contemporary life, as well as the growing number of disastrous industrial accidents, interest in risk communication has burgeoned. Consequently, scholars and practitioners need to understand two of the more common responses to risk situations, the technical and democratic. This paper describes these two responses, identifies types of individuals likely to prefer each, and explains why, historically and sociologically, they are so intuitively compelling for many people. Arguing that both responses to risk (...) situations are ultimately unconducive to rational discourse, the paper identifies problematic assumptions about communication that underlie both. The paper then sketches an alternative model of risk communication that recognizes the distinct features of communication in risk-ridden situations, describes ways in which communicators can identify characteristic tensions and goals in these situations, and specifies how to use research-supported heuristics for diagnosing the principal obstacles to their communicative goals and selecting the best strategies to address these obstacles. (shrink)

This paper argues that although moral intuitions are insufficient for making judgments on new technological innovations, they maintain great utility for informing responsible innovation. To do this, this paper employs the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology as an illustrative example of how stakeholder values can be better distilled to inform responsible innovation. Further, it is argued that moral intuitions are necessary for determining stakeholder values required for the design of responsible technologies. This argument is supported by the claim that the (...) moral intuitions of stakeholders allow designers to conceptualize stakeholder values and incorporate them into the early phases of design. It is concluded that design-for-values (DFV) frameworks like the VSD methodology can remain potent if developers adopt heuristic tools to diminish the influence of cognitive biases thus strengthening the reliability of moral intuitions. (shrink)

In this paper I present a critical analysis of the English law relating to the safeguarding of vulnerable adults, in particular how the law impacts on the sexual lives of adult women with mental disabilities. I consider the discourses of vulnerability that surround the different legal regimes and whether the emerging theoretical vulnerability literature can assist in developing more nuanced legal responses. I argue that the inherent jurisdiction and Care Act 2014 provide an opportunity to move away from the focus (...) on inherent features of vulnerability such as mental disability towards a more nuanced, situational and embodied account of what it means to safeguard ‘vulnerable adults’. This has the potential to be developed in England through the new legal framework of the Care Act and can be achieved through targeting interventions against the situational causes of vulnerability, for example the perpetrators of sexual violence. (shrink)

Though Bonhoeffer is usually thought to have been one of the architects of modern theology, he was also one of modernity’s most penetrating critics. The author lays out Bonhoeffer’s challenges to certain cherished modern assumptions by examining (1) his linkage of totalitarianism to the political utopianism that arose out of the French Revolution, (2) his fear of the nihilistic implications of the rationalists’ notion of the sovereign self and of the modern tendency to view life as an end in itself, (...) and (3) his suspicion of all forms of moral absolutism, including the Kantian absolutizing of the duty to tell the truth. What emerges is a picture of Bonhoeffer as a theologian who coupled a keen sense of our creatureliness and limitation with a resolute belief in the activity of God in history, and of Bonhoeffer as an ethicist who generated a Christian relational ethics that offers an alternative to both the ethics of abstract principle and the ethics of intuitive situational response. (shrink)

According to Hubert Dreyfus’s famous claim that expertise is fundamentally “mindless,” experts in any domain perform most effectively when their activity is automatic and unmediated by concepts or cognitive processes like attention and memory. While several scholars have recently challenged the plausibility of Dreyfus’s “mindless” account of expertise for explaining a wide range of expert activities, there has been little consideration of the one form of expertise which might be most amenable to Dreyfus’s account – namely, perceptual expertise. Indeed, Dreyfus’s (...) account of expert coping is ultimately an account of perceptual expertise, in that an expert’s intuitive situational responses are thought to rely on a sophisticated repertoire of perceptual skills. In this paper, I examine the feedforward model of sensory processing that Dreyfus uses to illustrate the perceptual underpinnings of expert action, and consider its resonance with psychological research that characterizes perceptual expertise as being automatic, holistic, pre-attentive, and non-cognitive in nature. However, citing competing empirical research, I argue instead that Dreyfus’s model of perceptual expertise cannot adequately explain the integral roles of attention, memory, and conceptual knowledge in expert object recognition. I conclude that the Dreyfusian model of perceptual expertise fails – the perceptual repertoire of skills that grounds expert object recognition is not operative in isolation from the expert’s conceptual repertoire. (shrink)

Though Bonhoeffer is usually thought to have been one of the architects of modern theology, he was also one of modernity's most penetrating critics. The author lays out Bonhoeffer's challenges to certain cherished modern assumptions by examining (1) his linkage of totalitarianism to the political utopianism that arose out of the French Revolution, (2) his fear of the nihilistic implications of the rationalists' notion of the sovereign self and of the modern tendency to view life as an end in itself, (...) and (3) his suspicion of all forms of moral absolutism, including the Kantian absolutizing of the duty to tell the truth. What emerges is a picture of Bonhoeffer as a theologian who coupled a keen sense of our creatureliness and limitation with a resolute belief in the activity of God in history, and of Bonhoeffer as an ethicist who generated a Christian relational ethics that offers an alternative to both the ethics of abstract principle and the ethics of intuitive situational response. (shrink)

Research on moral distress has paid limited attention to nurses’ responses and actions. In a survey of nurses’ perceptions of moral distress and ethical climate, 292 nurses answered three open-ended questions about situations that they considered morally distressing. Participants identified a range of situations as morally distressing, including witnessing unnecessary suffering, being forced to provide care that compromised values, and negative judgments about patients. They linked these situations to contextual constraints such as workload and described responses, including feeling incompetent and (...) distancing themselves from patients. Participants described considerable effort to effect change, calling into question the utility of defining moral distress as an “inability to act due to institutional constraints” or a “failure to pursue a right course of action.” Various understandings of moral distress operated, and action was integral to their responses. The findings suggest further conceptual work on moral distress and effort to support system-level change. (shrink)

So-called “manipulation arguments” have played a significant role in recent debates between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Incompatibilists take such arguments to show that agents who lack ultimate control over their characters or actions are not free. Most compatibilists agree that manipulated agents are not free but think this is because certain of the agent’s psychological capacities have been compromised. Chandra Sekhar Sripada has conducted an interesting study in which he applies an array of statistical tools to subjects’ intuitive responses to (...) a manipulation case, and he insists that the results of his study provide compelling evidence that people favor compatibilist views of freedom. I argue that because the case that forms the centerpiece of his study is relevantly different from the sort of cases incompatibilists have developed and because he fails to build deterministic conditions into this case, Sripada’s data cannot help settle the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists. (shrink)

In three experiments we studied lay observers’ attributions of responsibility for an antisocial act (homicide). We systematically varied both the degree to which the action was coerced by external circumstances and the degree to which the actor endorsed and accepted ownership of the act, a psychological state that philosophers have termed ‘identification’. Our findings with respect to identification were highly consistent. The more an actor was identified with an action, the more likely observers were to assign responsibility to the actor, (...) even when the action was performed under constraints so powerful that no other behavioral option was available. Our findings indicate that social cognition involving assignment of responsibility for an action is a more complex process than previous research has indicated. It would appear that laypersons’ judgments of moral responsibility may, in some circumstances, accord with philosophical views in which freedom and determinism are regarded to be compatible. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I (...) present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses. (shrink)

Racial profiling appears to be morally more troubling when the racial group that is the object of the profile suffers from background injustice. This article examines two accounts of this intuition. The responsibility-based account maintains that racial profiling is morally more problematic if the higher offender rate within the profiled group is the result of social injustices for which other groups in society are responsible. The expressive harm based account maintains that racial profiling is more problematic if it makes background (...) injustice vivid and thereby causes the profiled to feel resentment. I raise problems with both accounts and suggest a third account. On the humiliation-based account, individuals who are subjected to racial profiling in a context of background injustice are placed in a situation in which they cannot prevent appearing to onlookers in a demeaning way. (shrink)

An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.

The present book tries to show that the transcentendal-pragmatic approach to discourse ethics can reconstruct the genesis of this situation and provide a ...

The performance of the Mundurucu on the number-space task may exemplify a general competence for drawing analogies between space and other linear dimensions, but Mundurucu participants spontaneously chose number when other dimensions were available. Response placement may not reflect the subjective scale for numbers, but Cantlon et al.'s proposal of a linear scale with scalar variability requires additional hypotheses that are problematic.

People who judge that a wrongdoer’s behaviour is determined are disposed, in certain cases, to judge that the wrongdoer cannot be responsible for his behaviour. Some try to explain this phenomenon by arguing that people are intuitive incompatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility. However, Peter Strawson argues that we excuse determined wrongdoers because judging that someone is determined puts us into a psychological state – ‘the objective stance’ – which prevents us from holding them responsible, not because we think (...) that determined wrongdoers cannot be responsible. Two studies were completed to test the claim that the objective stance prevents us from judging wrongdoers responsible. Implicit association measures revealed that participants primed in the objective stance appraised a wrongdoer more positively, but as no less blameworthy, than those neutrally primed. These findings raise doubts about Strawson’s explanation of our tendency to excuse determined wrongdoers. (shrink)