Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

Theories of free will are often measured against how well they capture everyday intuitions about free will. But what are these everyday intuitions, and what theoretical commitments do they express? Empirical methods have delivered mixed messages. In response, some free will theorists have developed error theories to undermine the credentials of countervailing intuitions. These efforts are predicated on the idea that people might misunderstand determinism in any of several ways. This paper sheds light on the comprehension problem. We first discuss (...) recent efforts to explain systematic errors in how people interpret determinism. Then, we present the alarming results of two new preregistered studies exploring three types of comprehension failure: (a) epiphenomenal bypassing, (b) fatalistic bypassing, and (c) indeterministic intrusion. Our findings suggest that misunderstanding runs deeper than others have supposed. This casts doubt on existing models of commonsense thinking about free will. Unless and until researchers properly control for the kinds of misunderstandings we identify, research on free will intuitions cannot shed light on whether ordinary thinking reflects commitments to compatibilism or incompatibilism. (shrink)

Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, (2) that people (...) with predominantly incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and (3) people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies (n = 378) that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity. (shrink)

Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility with the concept (...) of determinism, which calls into question the validity of experimental work operating under the Vignette-Judgment model. We also argue that alternative experimental paradigms are unlikely to elicit judgments that are philosophically relevant to questions about the metaphysics of free will. (shrink)

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising (...) modification of the communication argument. (shrink)

In this paper I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the most tricky concepts around sexuality and moral psychology, including rape, consensual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I begin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual liberty rights that are derived from our fundamental human liberty rights: sexual self-possession, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, sexual dignity and sexual privacy. I then argue (...) (against the standard interpretation) that experimental findings in moral psychology show that the principle of respect for persons—a principle that grounds our human liberty rights—drives our intuitive moral judgments. In light of this discussion, I examine a puzzle about sex by deception—a puzzle which at first may seem to compel us to define 'rape' strictly in terms of force rather than sexual autonomy. I proceed by presenting an argument against the view that, as a rule, sex by deception undermines consent—a position held by prominent thinkers such as Philippe Patry (2001), Onora O’Neill (2003), Rubenfeld (2012), Tom Dougherty (2013a, 2013b), Joyce M. Short (2013), and Danielle Bromwich and Joseph Millum (2013, 2018). As we will see, sex following deception to increase your chances does not always constitute rape. Lying about your age, education, job, family background, marital status, or interest in a relationship, for example, does not make your sex partner incapable of consenting, which is to say that sex by deception need not be rape. I even go so far as to say that sex with another person that is facilitated by withholding information about having a venereal disease shouldn't be classified as rape. Although sex by deception doesn't compromise consent, it nonetheless violates the principle of respect for persons, not by vitiating sexual autonomy and compromising consent, but by failing to respect other sexual rights, such as our rights to sexual dignity, individuality, and privacy. (shrink)

After decades of receiving a lot of attention on the epistemological level, the so-called ‘problem of intuitions’ is now in the center of debates on the metaphilosophical level. One of the reasons for this lies in the unfruitfulness of the epistemological discussions that recently subsided without producing any significant or broadly accepted theory of intuitions. Consequently, the metaphilosophical level of discussion of the ‘problem of intuitions’ inherits the same difficulties of the epistemological level. The significance of Max Deutsch’s book The (...) Myth of the Intuitive is his effort to resolve these problems in a clear and persuasive way. He is not only trying to debunk problems behind the vagueness of the ‘intuition-talk’ by drawing important distinctions that usually go under the radar in the contemporary literature, but also develops his own account of philosophical methodology. In this paper I will present some of his arguments against the traditional view of intuitional methodology, as well as his own solutions to the presented problems. Regardless of Deutsch’s insightful account of the ‘problem of intuitions’, I find that some difficulties in his own proposal are inherited from the unresolved issues of intuitions on the epistemological level. (shrink)

Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For (...) illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. (shrink)

Knobe (Analysis 63:190-193, 2003a, Philosophical Psychology 16:309-324, 2003b, Analysis 64:181-187, 2004b) found that people are more likely to attribute intentionality to agents whose actions resulted in negative side-effects that to agents whose actions resulted in positive ones. Subsequent investigation has extended this result to a variety of other folk psychological attributions. The present article reports experimental findings that demonstrate an analogous effect for belief ascriptions. Participants were found to be more likely to ascribe belief, higher degrees of belief, higher degrees (...) of rational belief, and dispositional belief to agents in central Knobe effect cases who bring about negative side-effects than to agents who bring about positive ones. These findings present a significant challenge to widely held views about the Knobe effect, since many explanations of it assume that agents in contrasting pairs of Knobe effect cases do not differ with respect to their beliefs. Participants were also found to be more confident that knowledge should be attributed than they were that belief or dispositional belief should be attributed. This finding strengthens the challenge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (2013) have launched against the traditional view that knowledge entails belief. (shrink)

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of (...) surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension already present in the very idea of free will. I provide various lines of support (...) for this hypothesis, including some experimental data gathered by probing the judgments of non-specialists. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDem sogenannten Knobe-Effekt zufolge bestimmt die moralische Valenz von Nebeneffekten menschlichen Verhaltens die Zuschreibung ihrer absichtlichen Verursachung. Wir argumentieren, dass erstens die empirisch ermittelten sozialpsychologischen Daten den Knobe-Effekt in der üblichen Lesart nicht belegen, vor allem wegen der unvollständigen Untersuchung der entscheidenden moralischen Varianzfaktoren. Zweitens zeigen wir, dass - und wie - eine spezifische Version des traditionellen Prinzips des Doppeleffekts den empirisch bestätigten Teil des Knobe-Effekts philosophisch erklärt. Die Erklärungskraft des Prinzips des Doppeleffekts kann auch als eine Rechtfertigung eben dieses (...) Prinzips gesehen werden. (shrink)

What are the folk-conceptual connections between free will and consciousness? In this paper I present results which indicate that consciousness plays central roles in folk conceptions of free will. When conscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent acted freely. And when unconscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent did not act freely. Further, these studies contribute to recent experimental work on folk philosophical affiliation, which analyzes folk responses to determine whether folk views (...) are consistent with the view that free will and determinism are incompatible (incompatibilism) or with the opposite view (compatibilism). Conscious causation of behavior tends to elicit pro-free will judgments, even when the causation takes place deterministically. Thus, when controlling for consciousness, many folk seem to be compatibilists. However, participants who disagree with the deterministic or cognitive scientific descriptions given of human behavior tend to give incompatibilist responses. (shrink)

Many theories of racism presuppose that ordinary usage of the term “racism” should be preserved. Rarely is this presupposition—the presumption of conservatism—defended. This paper discusses the work of Lawrence Blum, Joshua Glasgow, Jorge Garcia, Tommie Shelby, and others, in order to develop a critique of the presumption of conservatism. Against this presumption, I defend the following desideratum: If ordinary usage of “racism” prompts significant practical difficulties that can be averted by revising ordinary usage, then this counts as a mark against (...) the normative status of ordinary usage and so counts as a reason for revising it. The significance of this argument is that it clears the way for a rigorous defense of revisionism. My paper provides a prima facie case for revisionism, built on two practical criticisms of the ordinary usage of “racism.” First, ordinary usage reflects incompatible norms that promote conceptual confusion and misunderstanding, among other problems. Second, ordinary usage reflects an individualistic conception of racism that serves the interests of whites. By championing ordinary usage in our philosophical theories, we (unwittingly) promote the interests of whites over nonwhites. (shrink)