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The ethical project

Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2011)

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  1. Vindicating universalism: Pragmatic genealogy and moral progress.Charlie Blunden & Benedict Lane - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    How do we justify the normative standards to which we appeal in support of our moral progress judgments, given their historical and cultural contingency? To answer this question in a noncircular way, Elizabeth Anderson and Philip Kitcher appeal exclusively to formal features of the methodology by which a moral change was brought about; some moral methodologies are systematically less prone to bias than others and are therefore less vulnerable to error. However, we argue that the methodologies espoused by Anderson and (...)
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  • Bessere Begriffe? Zur Möglichkeit des Fortschritts durch Begriffsgestaltung.Cyrill Mamin - manuscript
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  • Evolutionary Explanations of Our Reliability.Sinan Dogramaci - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17 (1):197-224.
    It can easily look like evolution is in a better position to explain the reliability of our perceptual beliefs than the reliability of our moral beliefs. This paper takes a closer look at the issue and argues that there’s no reason—no reason which armchair philosophers could uncover—to think evolution can better explain perceptual reliability than moral reliability. It also offers a diagnosis of why it seemed otherwise. The diagnosis concerns our need to use the truth predicate as a generalizing logical (...)
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  • Evolutionary Debunking and the Folk/Theoretical Distinction.M. Scarfone - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (2):269-287.
    In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue (...)
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  • Nonhuman Moral Agency: A Practice-Focused Exploration of Moral Agency in Nonhuman Animals and Artificial Intelligence.Dorna Behdadi - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Gothenburg
    Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...)
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  • Moral Progress and Grand Narrative Genealogy.Jinglin Zhou - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
    In this article, I explore the method of genealogy in moral philosophy, with a focus on evaluating the credibility of moral progress judgments. Despite genealogy becoming a new trend in this field, I critique three types of defective grand narrative genealogies represented by the works of Peter Railton, Michael Huemer, and Nicholas Smyth. I argue that their genealogies fail to be adequate for evaluating moral progress judgments’ credibility. Railton’s genealogy lacks specificity regarding the relatum of the causal story he presents, (...)
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  • In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Evan Westra, Simon Fitzpatrick, Sarah F. Brosnan, Thibaud Gruber, Catherine Hobaiter, Lydia M. Hopper, Daniel Kelly, Christopher Krupenye, Lydia V. Luncz, Jordan Theriault & Kristin Andrews - 2024 - Biological Reviews 1.
    Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...)
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  • The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...)
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  • Purity and Practical Reason: On Pragmatic Genealogy.Nicholas Smyth - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (37):1057-1081.
    Pragmatic Genealogy involves constructing fictional, quasi-historical models in order to discover what might explain and justify our concepts, ideas or practices. It arguably originated with Hume, but its most prominent practitioners are Edward Craig, Bernard Williams and Mathieu Queloz. Its defenders allege that the method allows us to understand “what the concept does for us, what its role in our life might be” (Craig, 1990), and that this in turn can ground practical reasons to preserve or further a conceptual practice. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Artificial virtuous agents: from theory to machine implementation.Jakob Stenseke - 2023 - AI and Society 38 (4):1301-1320.
    Virtue ethics has many times been suggested as a promising recipe for the construction of artificial moral agents due to its emphasis on moral character and learning. However, given the complex nature of the theory, hardly any work has de facto attempted to implement the core tenets of virtue ethics in moral machines. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate how virtue ethics can be taken all the way from theory to machine implementation. To achieve this goal, we (...)
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  • The Transformative Power of Social Movements.Heydari Fard Sahar - 2023 - Philosophy Compass (1):e12951.
    Social movements possess transformative and progressive power. In this paper, I argue that how this is so, or even if this is so, depends on one's explanatory framework. I consider three such explanatory frameworks for social movements: methodological individualism, collectivism, and complexity theory. In evaluating the various appeals and weaknesses of these frameworks, I show that complexity theory is uniquely poised to capture the complex and dynamic reality of the social world.
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  • By Which We May Be Judged: Moral Epistemology, Mind-Independent Truth Conditions And Sources Of Normativity.Maarten Van Doorn - 2022 - Dissertation, Central European University
    Many hope that our values, purged of messy human contingency, could aspire to correspond with mind-independent, rationally obligatory, and eternal ethical facts. But if the arguments of this thesis are on the right track, we should reject the search for non-natural and mind-independent moral truths.
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  • An empirical argument against moral non-cognitivism.Thomas Pölzler & Jennifer Cole Wright - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (6):1141-1169.
    According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological worries (...)
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  • Altruistic Motivation Beyond Ultimate Desires.Junior Mendonca - 2023 - Dissertation, The University of Western Australia
    The term “altruism” is used in many ways. In this thesis, I discuss altruism as a motivation, which is an influential notion in philosophy and the social sciences. Questions about the nature and the possibility of altruistic motivation have inspired much debate, both in academia and in everyday conversations. How can we know when we are truly altruistic and when we are merely helping others as a means to some egoistic goal? Are humans even capable of genuine altruistic motivation or (...)
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  • An Evolutionary Account of Guilt?Charlie Kurth - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    . Grant Ramsey and Michael Deem argue that appreciating the role that empathy plays in posttransgression guilt leads to a more promising account of the emotion’s evolutionary origins. But because their proposal fails to adequately distinguish guilt from shame, we cannot say which of the two emotions we are actually getting an evolutionary account of. Moreover, a closer look at the details suggests both that empathy may be more relevant for our understanding of shame’s evolutionary origins than guilt’s, and that (...)
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  • Prospects for pure procedural moral progress.Benedict Lane - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology (...)
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  • Recalibrating evolutionary debunking.Justis Koon - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):456-478.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that, if moral realism is true, all of our moral beliefs are unjustified. In this paper, I respond to two of the most enduring objections that have been raised against these arguments. The first objection claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are self-undermining, because they cannot be formulated without invoking epistemic principles, and epistemic principles are just as vulnerable to debunking as our moral beliefs. I argue that this objection suffers from several defects, the most (...)
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  • Can Rational Reflection Save Moral Knowledge From Debunking?Noah McKay - 2023 - Episteme 1:1-16.
    I reply to an influential objection to evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism. According to this objection, our capacity for autonomous rational reflection allows us to grasp moral truths independently of distorting evolutionary influences, so those influences do not prevent us from having moral knowledge. I argue that rational moral reflection is not, in fact, autonomous from evolutionary influences, since it depends on our evolved, pre-reflective grasp of moral properties. I then consider and reject the suggestion that realists can supply (...)
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  • The Source of Normativity.John Bengson, Terence Cuneo & Russ Shafer-Landau - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):706-729.
    This paper seeks to clarify one of the deepest questions about the source or ground of normativity, while also presenting an essence-based approach to answering it. We call it the ‘Arché Question.’ Though all metanormative theories must address this question, very few realists have explicitly grappled with the challenge it poses; those who have appear to deny any need to give an answer. After critically discussing extant realist responses, this paper outlines an essence-based approach to answering the Arché Question that (...)
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  • A lineage explanation of human normative guidance: the coadaptive model of instrumental rationality and shared intentionality.Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-32.
    This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on normative cognition by providing a lineage explanation of human social norm psychology. This approach builds upon theories of goal-directed behavioral control in the reinforcement learning and control literature, arguing that this form of control defines an important class of intentional normative mental states that are instrumental in nature. I defend the view that great ape capacities for instrumental reasoning and our capacity (or family of capacities) for shared intentionality coadapted to (...)
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  • Pragmatism and the Ethic of Meliorism.James Liszka - 2021 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 13 (2).
    The founding pragmatists were meliorists, arguing for the possibility of improvement in the human condition. At the same time, they did not think that progress was something inevitable. It was constrained by a tragic order that would prevent any movement toward a utopian ideal and could always lead to regress. Because they could not abide the notion of an absolute, pre-determined sense of the good, they did not subscribe to a moral perfectionism as well. Instead, Peirce, James and Dewey argued (...)
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  • Pistols, pills, pork and ploughs: the structure of technomoral revolutions.Jeroen Hopster, Chirag Arora, Charlie Blunden, Cecilie Eriksen, Lily Frank, Julia Hermann, Michael Klenk, Elizabeth O'Neill & Steffen Steinert - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-33.
    The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do (...)
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  • Reasons of Love and Conceptual Good-for-Nothings.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - In Michael Frauchiger & Markus Stepanians (eds.), Themes from Susan Wolf. Berlin: De Gruyter.
    What reasons do we have to use certain concepts and conceptions rather than others? Approaching that question in a methodologically humanistic rather than Platonic spirit, one might seek “reasons for concept use” in how well concepts serve the contingent human concerns of those who live by them. But appealing to the instrumentality of concepts in meeting our concerns invites the worry that this yields the wrong kind of reasons, especially if the relevant concerns are nonmoral ones. Drawing on Susan Wolf’s (...)
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  • How we got stuck: The origins of hierarchy and inequality. [REVIEW]Jonathan Birch & Andrew Buskell - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (4):751-759.
    Kim Sterelny's book The Pleistocene social contract provides an exceptionally well-informed and credible narrative explanation of the origins of inequality and hierarchy. In this essay review, we reflect on the role of rational choice theory in Sterelny's project, before turning to Sterelny's reasons for doubting the importance of cultural group selection. In the final section, we compare Sterelny's big picture with an alternative from David Wengrow and David Graeber.
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  • The evolution of moral belief: support for the debunker’s causal premise.Michael T. Dale - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (2):1-18.
    The causal premise of the evolutionary debunking argument contends that human moral beliefs are explained by the process of natural selection. While it is universally acknowledged that such a premise is fundamental to the debunker’s case, the vast majority of philosophers focus instead on the epistemic premise that natural selection does not track moral truth and the resulting skeptical conclusion. Recently, however, some have begun to concentrate on the causal premise. So far, the upshot of this small but growing literature (...)
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  • Recent Work on Moral Revolutions.Michael Klenk, Elizabeth O’Neill, Chirag Arora, Charlie Blunden, Cecilie Eriksen, Lily Frank & Jeroen Hopster - 2022 - Analysis 82 (2):354-366.
    In the last few decades, several philosophers have written on the topic of moral revolutions, distinguishing them from other kinds of society-level moral change. This article surveys recent accounts of moral revolutions in moral philosophy. Different authors use quite different criteria to pick out moral revolutions. Features treated as relevant include radicality, depth or fundamentality, pervasiveness, novelty and particular causes. We also characterize the factors that have been proposed to cause moral revolutions, including anomalies in existing moral codes, changing honour (...)
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  • Metafysiikka valistuksena.Jani Hakkarainen - 2022 - In Hemmo Laiho (ed.), Valistuksen perinnöt: Suomen Filosofisen Yhdistyksen kollokvion esitelmiä. University of Turku. pp. 37-48.
    Kirjoituksessa argumentoin, että metafysiikka on ollut valistusta, vaikka se edelleen kaipaa lisää valistumista, kun valistus ymmärretään avoimena prosessina, joka ei ole ajasta ja paikasta riippuvaista. Käsittelen ensin sitä, mitä metafysiikka ja valistus ovat. Sitten lausun länsimaisen metafysiikan historiasta hyvin lyhyesti. Päätän esseen argumentoimalla, että metafysiikka on valistunutta siinä mielessä, että klassisen substanssi-ominaisuus-skeeman sokeasta seuraamisesta on pitkälti päästy eroon. Metafysiikka kaipaa kuitenkin lisää valistusta ja kriittistä tarkastelua, jotta vapaudumme täysin kyseisen skeeman ja modernin predikaatti-logiikan johdatuksen aiheuttamasta kolmesta ongelmallisesta suositusta (tausta)oletuksesta: (1) (...)
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  • Naturalising Kant.Philip Kitcher - 2022 - Kantian Journal 41 (1):118-146.
    The third formulation of the Categorical Imperative rarely receives the attention devoted to its predecessors. This paper aims to develop a naturalistic approach to morality inspired by Kant’s conception of moral agents as legislating in a Kingdom of Ends. Positions derived from the third formulation, John Rawls’s Kantian Constructivism and T. M. Scanlon’s Contractualism, cleave closely to Kant in idealising the process of legislation. For Rawls, the citizens of the Kantian Reich can be reduced to one, a representative of all, (...)
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  • Theorizing social change.Robin Zheng - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (4):e12815.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.
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  • What Roles Do Emotions Play in Morality?Antti Kauppinen - 2024 - In Andrea Scarantino (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Emotion Theory. Routledge.
    This chapter offers an overview of four key debates about the roles of emotion in morality. First, many believe that emotions are an important psychological mechanism for explaining altruistic behavior and moral conscience in humans. Second, there is considerable debate about the causal role of affective reactions in moral judgment. Third, some philosophers have argued that emotions have a constitutive role in moral thought and even moral facts. Finally, philosophers disagree about whether affective influence undermines the justification of moral beliefs (...)
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  • Are we virtuously caring or just anxious?Charlie Kurth - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e69.
    According to Grossmann, the high levels of cooperation seen in humans are the result of a “virtuous caring cycle” on which the increased care that more fearful children receive brings increased cooperative tendencies in those children. But this proposal overlooks an equally well supported alternative on which children's anxiety – not a virtuous caring cycle – explains the cooperative tendencies of humans.
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  • Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics.George Matthews & Christina Hendricks (eds.) - 2019 - The Rebus Community.
    This is an open-access textbook designed for introduction to philosophy courses that contain a section on ethics, or for introductory courses in moral theory. In this edited work, chapter authors explore both historical and contemporary approaches to understanding and justifying moral and ethical norms. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including moral relativism, the relationship between ethics and religion, virtue ethics in the Western and Eastern traditions, the question of self-interest and ethics, utilitarianism, Kantian deontological ethics, and recent (...)
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  • (1 other version)Artificial virtuous agents: from theory to machine implementation.Jakob Stenseke - 2021 - AI and Society:1-20.
    Virtue ethics has many times been suggested as a promising recipe for the construction of artificial moral agents due to its emphasis on moral character and learning. However, given the complex nature of the theory, hardly any work has de facto attempted to implement the core tenets of virtue ethics in moral machines. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate how virtue ethics can be taken all the way from theory to machine implementation. To achieve this goal, we (...)
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  • Human Goals Are Constitutive of Agency in Artificial Intelligence.Elena Popa - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):1731-1750.
    The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...)
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  • Future value change: identifying realistic possibilities and risks.Jeroen Hopster - forthcoming - Prometheus.
    The co-shaping of technology and values is a topic of increasing interest among philosophers of technology. Part of this interest pertains to anticipating future value change, or what Danaher (2021) calls the investigation of “axiological futurism”. However, this investigation faces a challenge: “axiological possibility space” is vast, and we currently lack a clear account of how this space should be demarcated. It stands to reason that speculations about how values might change over time should exclude farfetched possibilities and be restricted (...)
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  • Moral Judgement and Moral Progress: The Problem of Cognitive Control.Michael Klenk & Hanno Sauer - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (7):938-961.
    We propose a fundamental challenge to the feasibility of moral progress: most extant theories of progress, we will argue, assume an unrealistic level of cognitive control people must have over their moral judgments for moral progress to occur. Moral progress depends at least in part on the possibility of individual people improving their moral cognition to eliminate the pernicious influence of various epistemically defective biases and other distorting factors. Since the degree of control people can exert over their moral cognition (...)
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  • The epistemology of evolutionary debunking.Justis Koon - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12155-12176.
    Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Contingency of the Cultural Evolution of Morality, Debunking, and Theism vs. Naturalism.Matthew Braddock - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 179-201.
    Is the cultural evolution of morality fairly contingent? Could cultural evolution have easily led humans to moral norms and judgments that are mostly false by our present lights? If so, does it matter philosophically? Yes, or so we argue. We empirically motivate the contingency of cultural evolution and show that it makes two major philosophical contributions. First, it shows that moral objectivists cannot explain the reliability of our moral judgments and thus strengthens moral debunking arguments. Second, it shows that the (...)
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  • The Failure of Traditional Environmental Philosophy.Joseph Heath - 2021 - Res Publica 28 (1):1-16.
    A notable feature of recent philosophical work on climate ethics is that it makes practically no reference to ‘traditional’ environmental philosophy. There is some irony in this, since environmental ethics arose as part of a broader movement within philosophy, starting in the 1960s, aimed at developing different fields of applied philosophy, in order to show how everyday practice could be enriched through philosophical reflection and analysis. The major goal of this paper is to explain why this branch of practical ethics (...)
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  • Charlie Kurth, The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties and Virtues of Anxiety. [REVIEW]Daniel Kelly - 2021 - Ethics 132 (1):249-255.
    Kurth wants us to understand and appreciate our anxiety more than we typically do. His concise and crisply written monograph makes a good case that we should. It deepens our understanding of what anxiety is, and of how it animates different facets of our mental and moral lives. The case he builds that, roughly, anxiety is one of the brain’s ways of affectively signaling and responding to uncertainty is clearly argued and meticulously organized. Kurth hits the targets he sets for (...)
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  • (1 other version)Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...)
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  • Moral Cheesecake, Evolved Psychology, and the Debunking Impulse.Daniel Kelly - 2016 - In Richard Joyce (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 342-358.
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  • Toolmaking and the Evolution of Normative Cognition.Jonathan Birch - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (1):1-26.
    We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative cognition evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of transmitting complex motor skills and craft skills, especially (...)
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  • Why Metaethics Needs Empirical Moral Psychology.Jeroen Hopster & Michael Klenk - 2020 - Critica 52 (155):27-54.
    What is the significance of empirical moral psychology for metaethics? In this article we take up Michael Ruse’s evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism and reassess it in the context of the empirical state of the art. Ruse’s argument depends on the phenomenological presumption that people generally experience morality as objective. We demonstrate how recent experimental findings challenge this widely-shared armchair presumption and conclude that Ruse’s argument fails. We situate this finding in the recent debate about Carnapian explication and argue (...)
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  • Context, Intersubjectivism, and Value: Humean Constructivism Revisited.Jocelyn Maclure - 2020 - Dialogue 59 (3):377-401.
    RÉSUMÉJe défends dans ce texte une version particulière de la position que Sharon Street a appelée le «constructivisme humien». J'esquisserai pourquoi je considère que ce constructivisme est préférable à la fois au réalisme moral et au constructivisme kantien sur le plan de la compréhension du statut ontologique des valeurs. Après avoir accepté de reconnaître le rôle des pressions de l’évolution dans l’émergence de la moralité, le constructivisme humien doit toutefois préciser le rôle de l'intersubjectivité historique dans l’évolution subséquente de la (...)
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  • The Evolutionary Debunker Meets Sentimental Realism.Mauro Rossi & Christine Tappolet - 2016 - In Giancarlo Marchetti & Sarin Marchetti (eds.), Facts and Values: The Ethics and Metaphysics of Normativity. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 176-195.
    In this paper, we propose a defence of Value Realism that relies on the unusual combination of Values Realism with Sentimentalism. What this account, which we call “Sentimental Realism”, holds, in a nutshell, is that what makes evaluative facts special is their relationship to emotions. More precisely, Sentimental Realism claims that evaluative facts are fully objective facts, but that such facts are picked out by concepts that are response-dependent, in the sense that they are essentially tied to emotions. Our plan (...)
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  • Dewey's Independent Factors in Moral Action [preprint].Steven Fesmire - 2020 - In Roberto Frega & Steven Levine (eds.), John Dewey’s Ethical Theory: The 1932 Ethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 18-39.
    Drawing on archival and published sources from 1926 to 1932, this chapter analyzes “Three Independent Factors in Morals” (1930) as a blueprint to Dewey’s chapters in the 1932 Ethics. The 1930 presentation is Dewey’s most concise and sophisticated critique of the quest in ethical theory for the central and basic source of normative justification. He argued that moral situations are heterogeneous in their origins and operations. They elude full predictability and are not controllable by the impositions of any abstract monistic (...)
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  • Out of Plumb, Out of Key, and Out of Whack: Social Ethics and Democracy for the New Normal.Steven Fesmire & Heather Keith - 2022 - Dewey Studies 6 (1):480-520.
    John Dewey proposed soon after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that citizens of techno-industrial nations suffer from "cultural lag" (LW 15:199-200; cf. LW 4:203-28). He had in mind a sort of moral jet lag, a condition in which most of the basic alternatives we have on hand to think and talk about moral and political life, from customary moralizing to sophisticated theorizing, were developed, canned, and pickled on a shelf so long ago that they now lag far behind (...)
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  • Moral Realism and the Existence of God: Improving Parfit’s Metaethics.Martin Jakobsen - 2020 - Leuven, Belgia: Peeters.
    Can there be an objective morality without God? Derek Parfit argues that it can and offers a theory of morality that is neither theistic nor naturalistic. This book provides a critical assessment of Parfit's metaethical theory. Jakobsen identifies some problems in Parfit’s theory – problems concerning moral normativity, the ontological status of morality, and evolutionary influence on our moral beliefs – and argues that theological resources can help solve them. By showing how Parfit’s theory may be improved by the help (...)
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  • An Empirical Argument against Moral Non-Cognitivism.Thomas Pölzler & Jen Wright - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological worries (...)
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