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Rationalist accounts of self-knowledge are motivated in important part by the claim that only by looking to our reasons to discover our beliefs and desires are we active in relation to them and only thereby do we take responsibility for them. These kinds of account seem to predict that self-knowledge generated using third-personal methods or analogues of these methods will tend to undermine the capacity to exercise self-control. In this light, the insistence by treatment programs that addicts acknowledge that they (...) |
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Philosophers who have written about implicit bias have claimed or implied that individuals are not responsible, and therefore not blameworthy, for their implicit biases, and that this is a function of the nature of implicit bias as implicit: below the radar of conscious reflection, out of the control of the deliberating agent, and not rationally revisable in the way many of our reflective beliefs are. I argue that close attention to the findings of empirical psychology, and to the conditions for (...) |
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Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a wideningresponsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial moral (...) |
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Addressing biases in natural-language processing (NLP) systems presents an underappreciated ethical dilemma, which we think underlies recent debates about bias in NLP models. In brief, even if we could eliminate bias from language models or their outputs, we would thereby often withhold descriptively or ethically useful information, despite avoiding perpetuating or amplifying bias. Yet if we do not debias, we can perpetuate or amplify bias, even if we retain relevant descriptively or ethically useful information. Understanding this dilemma provides for a (...) |
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Determinism is frequently understood as implying the possibility of perfect prediction. This possibility then functions as an assumption in the Manipulation Argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Yet this assumption is mistaken. As a result, arguments that rely on it fail to show that determinism would rule out human free will. We explain why determinism does not imply the possibility of perfect prediction in any world with laws of nature like ours, since it would be impossible for (...) |
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Much has been made about the ways that implicit biases and other apparently unreflective attitudes can affect our actions and judgments in ways that negatively affect our ability to do right. What has been discussed less is that these attitudes negatively affect our freedom. In this paper, I argue that implicit biases pose a problem for free will. My analysis focuses on the compatibilist notion of free will according to which acting freely consists in acting in accordance with our reflectively (...) |
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Can agents overcome unconscious psychological influences without being aware of them? Some philosophers and psychologists assume that agents need to be aware of psychological influences to successfully control behavior. The aim of this text is to argue that when agents engage in a proactive control strategy, they can successfully shield their behavior from some unconscious influences. If agents actively check for conflicts between their actions and mental states, they engage in reactive control. For engaging in reactive control, agents need awareness (...) |
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What’s the difference between those psychological posits that are ‘me” and those that are not? Distinguishing between these psychological kinds is important in many domains, but an account of what the distinction consists in is challenging. I argue for Psychological Constructionism: those psychological posits that correspond to the kinds within folk psychology are personal, and those that don’t, aren’t. I suggest that only constructionism can answer a fundamental challenge in characterizing the personal level – the plurality problem. The things that (...) |
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I first clarify the idea that blameworthiness requires consciousness as the view that one can be blameworthy only for what is a response to a reason of which one is conscious. Next I develop the following argument: blameworthiness requires exercising control in a way distinctive of persons and doing this, in view of what it is to be a person, requires responding to a reason of which one is conscious. Then I defend this argument from an objection inspired by Arpaly (...) |
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This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature is flawed because it limits normative business ethics to condemning (...) |
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Recent social‐psychological research suggests that a considerable amount of, for example, racial and gendered discrimination may be connected to implicit biases: mental processes beyond our direct control or endorsement, that influence our behaviour toward members of socially salient groups. In this article I seek to improve our understanding of the phenomenon of implicit bias, including its moral status, by examining it through the lens of a theory of discrimination. In doing so, I also suggest ways to improve this theory of (...) |
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In this chapter, we explore whether agents have an epistemic duty to eradicate implicit bias. Recent research shows that implicit biases are widespread and they have a wide variety of epistemic effects on our doxastic attitudes. First, we offer some examples and features of implicit biases. Second, we clarify what it means to have an epistemic duty, and discuss the kind of epistemic duties we might have regarding implicit bias. Third, we argue that we have an epistemic duty to eradicate (...) |
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A surge of empirical research demonstrating flexible cognition in animals and young infants has raised interest in the possibility of rational decision‐making in the absence of language. A venerable position, which I here call “Classical Inferentialism”, holds that nonlinguistic agents are incapable of rational inferences. Against this position, I defend a model of nonlinguistic inferences that shows how they could be practically rational. This model vindicates the Lockean idea that we can intuitively grasp rational connections between thoughts by developing the (...) |
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Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame. On these accounts, responsible agents are agents who can understand negative reactive attitudes and are sensitive to their moral-agency cultivating function. In this paper I examine our reproachful engagements with agents whose moral agency is underdeveloped or compromised. I discuss how these engagements compare to blaming on CC accounts and argue reproachful engagements can (...) |
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Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...) |
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According to one picture of the mind, decisions and actions are largely the result of automatic cognitive processing beyond our ability to control. This picture is in tension with a foundational principle in ethics that moral responsibility for behavior requires the ability to control it. The discovery of implicit attitudes contributes to this tension. According to the ability argument against moral responsibility, if we cannot control implicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes cause behavior, then we cannot be morally responsible for that (...) |
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Research programs in empirical psychology from the past two decades have revealed implicit biases. Although implicit processes are pervasive, unavoidable, and often useful aspects of our cognitions, they may also lead us into error. The most problematic forms of implicit cognition are those which target social groups, encoding stereotypes or reflecting prejudicial evaluative hierarchies. Despite intentions to the contrary, implicit biases can influence our behaviours and judgements, contributing to patterns of discriminatory behaviour. These patterns of discrimination are obviously wrong and (...) |
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Research programs in empirical psychology over the past few decades have led scholars to posit implicit biases. This is due to the development of innovative behavioural measures that have revealed aspects of our cognitions which may not be identified on self-report measures requiring individuals to reflect on and report their attitudes and beliefs. But what does it mean to characterise such biases as implicit? Can we satisfactorily articulate the grounds for identifying them as bias? And crucially, what sorts of cognitions (...) |
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In this paper, I set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition. I present test cases and suggest that, when considered in light of them, some recent models of implicit cognition fail to satisfy these desiderata. The test cases also bring to light an important class of cases that have been almost completely ignored in philosophical discussions of implicit cognition and implicit bias. These cases have important work to do in helping us understand both the role of implicit (...) |
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Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, ‘introspectively inaccessible’ attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals’ moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals’ partial awareness of their implicit biases makes (...) |
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The proposal of moral enhancement as a valuable means to face the environmental, technological and social challenges that threaten the future of humanity has been criticized by a number of authors. One of the main criticisms has been that moral enhancement would diminish our freedom. It has been said that moral enhancement would lead enhanced people to lose their ‘freedom to fall’, that is, it would prevent them from being able to decide to carry out some morally bad actions, and (...) |
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How do cognition and affect interact to produce action? Research in intergroup psychology illuminates this question by investigating the relationship between stereotypes and prejudices about social groups. Yet it is now clear that many social attitudes are implicit. This raises the question: how does the distinction between cognition and affect apply to implicit mental states? An influential view—roughly analogous to a Humean theory of action—is that “implicit stereotypes” and “implicit prejudices” constitute two separate constructs, reflecting different mental processes and neural (...) |
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Implicit intergroup biases have been shown to impact social behavior in many unsettling ways, from disparities in decisions to “shoot” black and white men in a computer simulation to unequal gender-based evaluations of résumés and CVs. It is a difficult question whether, and in what way, agents are responsible for behaviors affected by implicit biases. I argue that in paradigmatic cases agents are responsible for these behaviors in the sense that the behavior is “attributable” to them. That is, behaviors affected (...) |
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Linguistic discrimination is a complex phenomenon. How should it be investigated? Evidential pool is of key importance. In this paper, we present specific conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of linguistic discrimination, with a focus on linguistic discrimination resulting from implicit attitudes and the steadily growing research on biases and structural approaches to social injustice. We conclude by proposing that a productive and comprehensive way to investigate linguistic discrimination rooted in implicit attitudes should seek to incorporate first-person perspectives and (...) |
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Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they (...) |
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Human beings are internally inconsistent in various ways. One way to develop this thought involves using the language of value alignment: the values we hold are not always aligned with our behavior, and are not always aligned with each other. Because of this self-misalignment, there is room for potential projects of human enhancement that involve achieving a greater degree of value alignment than we presently have. Relatedly, discussions of AI ethics sometimes focus on what is known as the value alignment (...) |
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RÉSUMÉOn pense souvent qu'un changement significatif de notre caractère évaluatif pourrait saper notre responsabilité par rapport à nos méfaits passés. Dans cet article, j'explore cette intuition en analysant les concepts de responsabilité et de l'obligation de rendre des comptes, tels que présentés par Angela Smith. J'introduis une distinction entre « modification » et « remplacement » pour définir les limites de la responsabilité au fil du temps. Ces limites sont ensuite précisées en s'inspirant des travaux de Delia Graff sur les (...) |
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Governments, physicians, media and academics have all called for individuals to bear responsibility for their own health. In this article, I argue that requiring those with adverse health outcomes to bear responsibility for these outcomes is a bad basis for policy. The available evidence strongly suggests that the capacities for responsible choice, and the circumstances in which these capacities are exercised, are distributed alongside the kinds of goods we usually talk about in discussing distributive justice, and this distribution significantly explains (...) |
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In this paper I ask what implicit attitudes tell us about our freedom. I analyze the relation between the literature on implicit attitudes and an important subcategory of theories of free will—self-disclosure accounts. If one is committed to such a theory, I suggest one may have to move to a more social conceptualization of the capacity for freedom. I will work out this argument in five sections. In the first section, I discuss the specific theories of free will that are (...) |
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Epistemic injustice is a kind of injustice that arises when one’s capacity as an epistemic subject is wrongfully denied. In recent years it has been argued that psychiatric patients are often harmed in their capacity as knowers and suffer from various forms of epistemic injustice that they encounter in psychiatric services. Acknowledging that epistemic injustice is a multifaceted problem in psychiatry calls for an adequate response. In this paper I argue that, given that psychiatric patients deserve epistemic respect and have (...) |
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The received view of implicit bias holds that it is associative and unreflective. Recently, the received view has been challenged. Some argue that implicit bias is not predicated on “any” associative process, but it is unreflective. These arguments rely, in part, on debiasing experiments. They proceed as follows. If implicit bias is associative and unreflective, then certain experimental manipulations cannot change implicitly biased behavior. However, these manipulations can change such behavior. So, implicit bias is not associative and unreflective. This paper (...) |
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There is a philosophical puzzle about blaming people for their attitudes that arises because we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes. The fact that we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes suggests that we are not responsible for them. Defenders of blaming people for their beliefs have appealed to various senses in which we are responsible for our beliefs, despite our lacking direct voluntary control over them. In this paper, I pursue a different strategy. I argue that it (...) |
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This essay explores why examples of mainstream philosophy of cognition and applied phenomenology demonstrate the implicit bias that they treat as their subject matter, whether the authors of these works intend or approve of their doing so. It is shown why egalitarian intuitions, which form the basis for ideal models of justice appealing to elites in racially stratified societies, provide an inadequate framework for illuminating and dismantling the mechanics of racial discrimination. Recently developed results in social choice theory are applied (...) |
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A surge of empirical research demonstrating flexible cognition in animals and young infants has raised interest in the possibility of rational decision-making in the absence of language. A venerable position, which I here call “Classical Inferentialism”, holds that nonlinguistic agents are incapable of rational inferences. Against this position, I defend a model of nonlinguistic inferences that shows how they could be practically rational. This model vindicates the Lockean idea that we can intuitively grasp rational connections between thoughts by developing the (...) |
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The topic of this paper is what I will call “biased emotion”. Biased emotions are emotions which are influenced by implicit bias. An example is racially biased fear. A person who explicitly denies that every black man is dangerous, might implicitly have the tendency to be afraid of black men. Biased emotions lead to certain types of behavior, such as avoidance behavior out of fear. Some have argued that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are not attributable. Because fearful behavior is (...) |
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It is widely believed that implicit bias is common and that it contributes, in part, to the perpetuation of systemic injustice. Hence, the existence of implicit bias raises the question: can individuals be blameworthy for their implicit bias? Here, I consider what it is about implicit bias that renders agents blameworthy. I defend the claim that, when individuals omit to engage in activities that could prevent the influence of implicit bias on their behavior, they may be blamed for their implicit (...) |
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In this article, I describe how gender bias can affect the design, testing, clinical trials, regulatory approval, and clinical use of implantable devices. I argue that bad outcomes experienced by women patients are a cumulative consequence of small biases and inattention at various points of the design, testing, and regulatory process. However, specific instances of inattention and bias can be difficult to identify, and risks are difficult to predict. This means that even if systematic gender bias in implant design is (...) |
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I agree with those proponents of bio-medical moral enhancement who claim that we face large-scale global moral problems which are currently un-recognised or un-acted upon. But I argue that the proposed bio-medical means for tackling them is misconceived. I show that both bio-medical and “traditional” conceptions of moral enhancement share a misleading picture of the relation between the moral psychology of individuals and the socially structured moral problems with which they are faced. The argument unfolds in three stages. First I (...) |
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Orthodox literature on bias follows what I call the Dualistic Alignment Hypothesis. The basis of this dualistic paradigm culminates in the assumption that there is a principled distinction between explicit attitudes and implicit bias and the behaviour guided by each. In this thesis I do two things. First, I challenge the dualistic paradigm on empirical and conceptual grounds. Further, I show that dualistic thinking faces serious challenges. Ultimately, I reject the dualistic paradigm as the best explanatory theory of bias. Second, (...) |
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