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  1. Conceptual Baggage and How to Unpack It.Emilia L. Wilson - 2024 - Dissertation, University of St Andrews
    Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...)
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  • Determination from Above.Kenneth Silver - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):237-251.
    There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered (...)
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  • Framing Effects Do Not Undermine Consent.Samuel Director - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):221-235.
    Suppose that a patient is receiving treatment options from her doctor. In one case, the doctor says, “the surgery has a 90% survival rate.” Now, suppose the doctor instead said, “the procedure has a 10% mortality rate.” Predictably, the patient is more likely to consent on the first description and more likely to dissent on the second. This is an example of a framing effect. A framing effect occurs when “the description of [logically-equivalent] options in terms of gains (positive frame) (...)
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  • Epistemic Health, Epistemic Immunity and Epistemic Inoculation.Adam Piovarchy & Scott Siskind - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2329-2354.
    This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded by many different things (e.g. research funding, social trust), and many different kinds of inquiry are relevant to its study. Epistemic immunity is (...)
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  • Manipulation, machine induction, and bypassing.Gabriel De Marco - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):487-507.
    A common style of argument in the literature on free will and moral responsibility is the Manipulation Argument. These tend to begin with a case of an agent in a deterministic universe who is manipulated, say, via brain surgery, into performing some action. Intuitively, this agent is not responsible for that action. Yet, since there is no relevant difference, with respect to whether an agent is responsible, between the manipulated agent and a typical agent in a deterministic universe, responsibility is (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Online Manipulation.Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.) - 2022 - Routledge.
    Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...)
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  • If Nudges Treat their Targets as Rational Agents, Nonconsensual Neurointerventions Can Too.Thomas Douglas - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2):369-384.
    Andreas Schmidt and Neil Levy have recently defended nudging against the objection that nudges fail to treat nudgees as rational agents. Schmidt rejects two theses that have been taken to support the objection: that nudges harness irrational processes in the nudgee, and that they subvert the nudgee’s rationality. Levy rejects a third thesis that may support the objection: that nudges fail to give reasons. I argue that these defences can be extrapolated from nudges to some nonconsensual neurointerventions; if Schmidt’s and (...)
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  • Epistemic Paternalism via Conceptual Engineering.Eve Kitsik - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (4):616-635.
    This essay focuses on conceptual engineers who aim to improve other people's patterns of inference and attention by shaping their concepts. Such conceptual engineers sometimes engage in a form of epistemic paternalism that I call paternalistic cognitive engineering: instead of explicitly persuading, informing and educating others, the engineers non-consultatively rely on assumptions about the target agents’ cognitive systems to improve their belief forming. The target agents could reasonably regard such benevolent exercises of control as violating their sovereignty over their own (...)
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  • Nudging in Donation Policies: Registration and Decision-Making.Douglas MacKay & Katherine Saylor - 2021 - In Solveig Lena Hansen & Silke Schicktanz (eds.), Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplantation. Transcript Verlag. pp. 65-80.
    In this chapter, we provide an overview of the ethical considerations relevant to the use of nudges in organ donation policy. We do not defend a position on the permissibility of nudging in this context, but instead aim to clearly outline the strongest arguments on the different sides of this issue that have been presented in the English-language scholarly bioethics literature. We also highlight the questions that are in need of further investigation. In part 1, we briefly discuss nudging before (...)
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  • The Possibility of Epistemic Nudging: Reply to Grundmann.Jonathan Matheson & Valerie Joly Chock - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (8):36-42.
    In “The Possibility of Epistemic Nudging” (2021), Thomas Grundmann examines nudging as applied to doxastic attitudes. Grundmann argues that given the right presuppositions about knowledge, justified beliefs, and the relevant belief-forming processes, doxastic nudging can result in justified beliefs and even knowledge in the nudgee. In this short response we will raise some critical concerns for Grundmann’s project as well as open up a path for epistemic nudges (nudges that result in justified beliefs or knowledge) that Grundmann too quickly dismisses.
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  • Persuasive Technologies and the Right to Mental Liberty: The ‘Smart’ Rehabilitation of Criminal Offenders.Sjors Ligthart, Gerben Meynen & Thomas Douglas - forthcoming - In Marcello Ienca, O. Pollicino, L. Liguori, R. Andorno & E. Stefanini (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Information Technology, Life Sciences and Human Rights.
    Every day, millions of people use mobile phones, play video games and surf the Internet. It is thus important to determine how technologies like these change what people think and how they behave. This is a central issue in the study of persuasive technologies. ‘Persuasive technologies’—henceforth ‘PTs’—are digital technologies, such as mobile apps, video games and virtual reality systems, that are deployed for the explicit purpose of changing attitudes and/or behaviours, without using coercion, deception or extreme forms of psychological manipulation (...)
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  • Perspectives on Post-Truth.Filippo Ferrari, Anna Maria Lorusso, Sebastiano Moruzzi & Giorgio Volpe - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (2):141-149.
    This opening piece of the special issue ‘Perspectives on Post-Truth’ aims to accomplish three tasks. First, and foremost, it highlights the issue’s distinctive feature, namely its variegated approach to post-truth. The leading idea in assembling it has been to draw on different methodologies, theoretical approaches, and competences, in order to gain a fine-grained understanding of the post-truth condition and to develop an effective toolkit to address the most pressing challenges it poses to our societies. The underlying conviction is that a (...)
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  • It’s Our Epistemic Environment, Not Our Attitude Toward Truth, That Matters.Neil Levy - 2023 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 35 (1):94-111.
    The widespread conviction that we are living in a post-truth era rests on two claims: that a large number of people believe things that are clearly false, and that their believing these things reflects a lack of respect for truth. In reality, however, fewer people believe clearly false things than surveys or social media suggest. In particular, relatively few people believe things that are widely held to be bizarre. Moreover, accepting false beliefs does not reflect a lack of respect for (...)
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  • What (if anything) morally separates environmental from neurochemical behavioral interventions?Viktor Ivanković - 2023 - Neuroethics 17 (1):1-14.
    Drawing from the literatures on the ethics of nudging and moral bioenhancement, I elaborate several pairs of cases in which one intervention is classified as an environmental behavioral intervention (EBI) and the other as a neurochemical behavioral intervention (NBI) in order to morally compare them. The intuition held by most is that NBIs are by far the more morally troubling kind of influence. However, if this intuition cannot be vindicated, we should at least entertain the _Similarity Thesis_, according to which (...)
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  • In need of the general public’s participation in science: commentary on Bad Beliefs.Rie Iizuka & Chie Kobayashi - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (4):834-845.
    In his book Bad Beliefs, Neil Levy defends the engineering of our epistemic environment by removing epistemic pollutions and by nudging people through second-order evidence. Although we agree with his core ideas, in this commentary, we aim at supplementing his approach in light of the participation of the general public in science. In the first part, we argue that the issue of participatory epistemic injustice in the scientific community remains unaddressed in Levy’s discussion and that addressing the issue is equal (...)
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  • Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplantation.Solveig Lena Hansen & Silke Schicktanz (eds.) - 2021 - Transcript Verlag.
    This collection features comprehensive overviews of the various ethical challenges in organ transplantation. International readings well-grounded in the latest developments in the life sciences are organized into systematic sections and engage with one another, offering complementary views. All core issues in the global ethical debate are covered: donating and procuring organs, allocating and receiving organs, as well as considering alternatives. Due to its systematic structure, the volume provides an excellent orientation for researchers, students, and practitioners alike to enable a deeper (...)
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  • After the Pandemic: New Responsibilities.Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu - 2021 - Public Health Ethics 14 (2):120-133.
    Seasonal influenza kills many hundreds of thousands of people every year. We argue that the current pandemic has lessons we should learn concerning how we should respond to it. Our response to the COVID-19 not only provides us with tools for confronting influenza; it also changes our sense of what is possible. The recognition of how dramatic policy responses to COVID-19 were and how widespread their general acceptance has been allowed us to imagine new and more sweeping responses to influenza. (...)
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  • The Moral Permissibility of Perspective-Taking Interventions.Hannah Read & Thomas Douglas - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (3):337-352.
    Interventions designed to promote perspective taking are increasingly prevalent in educational settings, and are also being considered for applications in other domains. Thus far, these perspective-taking interventions (PTIs) have largely escaped philosophical attention, however they are sometimes _prima facie_ morally problematic in at least two respects: they are neither transparent nor easy to resist. Nontransparent or hard-to-resist PTIs call for a moral defense and our primary aim in this paper is to provide such a defense. We offer two arguments for (...)
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  • Framing provides reasons.Neil Levy - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e233.
    Framing effects are held to be irrational because preferences should remain stable across different descriptions of the same state of affairs. Bermúdez offers one reason why this may be false. I argue for another: If framing provides implicit testimony, then rational agents will alter their preferences accordingly. I show there is evidence that framing should be understood as testimonial.
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  • Pushed for Being Better: On the Possibility and Desirability of Moral Nudging.Bart Engelen & Thomas R. V. Nys - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-27.
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  • Access denied: epistemic obstruction and the distribution of knowledge.Heather Battaly - 2022 - Synthese 201 (1):1-20.
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  • Irresistible Nudges, Inevitable Nudges, and the Freedom to Choose.Jens Kipper - 2021 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 8 (2):285-303.
    In this paper, I examine how nudges affect the autonomy and freedom of those nudged. I consider two arguments put forth by Thaler and Sunstein for the claim that these effects can only be minor. According to the first of these arguments, nudges cannot significantly restrict a person’s autonomy or freedom since they are easy to resist. According to the second argument, the existence of nudges is inevitable, and thus, pursuing libertarian paternalism by nudging people doesn’t make a relevant difference (...)
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  • Rationalization enables cooperation and cultural evolution.Neil Levy - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43:e40.
    Cushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulative cultural evolution.
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