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Claims that emotions are or can be rational, and crucially enabling of rationality, are now fairly common, also outside of philosophy, but with considerable diversity both in their assumptions about emotions and their conceptions of rationality. Three main trends are worth picking out, both in themselves and for the potential tensions between them: accounts that defend a case for the rationality of emotions A) by assimilating emotions closely to beliefs or judgements; B) in terms of the very features that traditional (...) |
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Existentialism is compatible with a broadly biological vision of who we are. This thesis is grounded in an analysis of “concrete” or “individual” possibility, which differs from standard conceptions of possibility in that it allows for possibilities to come into being or disappear through time. Concrete possibilities are introduced both in individual life and by major transitions in evolution. In particular, the advent of ultrasociality and of language has enabled human goals to be formulated in partial independence from the vestigial (...) |
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Moral psychologists have shown that people’s past moral experiences can affect their subsequent moral decisions. One prominent finding in this line of research is that when people make a judgment about the Trolley dilemma after considering the Footbridge dilemma, they are significantly less likely to decide it is acceptable to redirect a train to save five people. Additionally, this ordering effect is asymmetrical, as making a judgment about the Trolley dilemma has little to no effect on people’s judgments about the (...) |
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In this paper, I address an ignored topic in the literature on self-deception—instances in which one is self-deceived about their emotions. Most discussions of emotion and self-deception address either the contributory role of emotion to instances of self-deception involving beliefs or assume what I argue is an outdated view of emotion according to which emotions just are beliefs or some other type of propositional attitude. In order to construct an account of self-deception about emotion, I draw a distinction between two (...) |
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Review Essay of Stephen P. Turner, Explaining the Normative, 2010. |
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Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the abstract/concrete paradox : the tendency to activate inconsistent intuitions depending on whether a problem to be analyzed is framed in abstract terms or is described as a concrete case. One recent study supports the thesis that this effect influences judicial decision-making, including decision-making by professional judges, in areas such as interpretation of constitutional principles and application of clear-cut rules. Here, following the existing literature in legal theory, we argue that (...) |
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This chapter addresses the question of what makes expressions meaningful according to the conception of meaning offered by Donald Davidson. It addresses this question by reflecting on Kathrin Glüer’s recent response to it. It argues that Glüer misconstrues both the evidence for meaning that the radical interpreter must rely on and the way in which the principle of charity must be deployed. The articulation of the correct construal of the evidence and the principle reveals the thoroughly non-reductionist aspect of Davidson’s (...) |
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A general feature of our moral psychology is that we feel that some moral demands are motivated externally. Stanford explains this feature with an evolutionary account, such that moral externalism was selected for its ability to facilitate prosocial interactions. Alternatively, I argue that a cognitive, non-selectionist account of moral externalism is a more parsimonious explanation. |
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People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and (...) |
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Jesse Prinz develops a naturalistic metaethical theory with which he purports to sidestep ‘Hume's law’ by demonstrating how, on his theory, in describing what our moral beliefs commit us to we can determine what our moral obligations are. I aim to show that Prinz does not deliver on his prescriptive promise – he does not bridge the is–ought gap in any meaningful way. Given that Prinz goes on to argue that (1) his moral psychology highlights fundamental shortcomings in ‘traditional’ normative (...) |
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In this article I examine whether Moral Foundations Theory can fulfil the promises that Haidt claims for the theory: that it will help in developing new approaches to moral education and to the moral conflicts that divide our diverse society. I argue that, first, the model that Haidt suggests for understanding the plurality of moralities—a shared foundation underlying diverse moralities—does not help to overcome conflicts. A better understanding of the nature and background of moral conflicts can lead to a more (...) |
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In the first part of the article, an account of moral judgment in terms of emotional dispositions is given. This account provides an expressivist explanation of three important features of moral demands: inescapability, authority independence and meriting. In the second part of the article, some ideas initially put forward by Christopher Boehm are developed and modified in order to provide a hypothesis about the evolution of the ability to token moral judgments. This hypothesis makes evolutionary sense of inescapability, authority independence (...) |
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Do we empathize with the others because first we have recognized them as somehow equals, or do we recognize them as equals because first we have empathized with them? This article explores the relation between affective empathy, the moral recognition of the others, and personal identity. I defend that, to recognize others as valuable and act in line with this, one must be able to feel affective empathy for their situation, and, to do so, one has to 1) be curious (...) |
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This work draws an analogical defence of strong emotionism—the metaethical claim that moral properties and concepts consist in the propensity of actions to elicit emotional responses from divergent emotional perspectives. I offer a theory that is in line with that of Prinz. I build an analogy between moral properties and what I call emotion-dispositional properties. These properties are picked out by predicates such as ‘annoying’, ‘frightening’ or ‘deplorable’ and appear to be uncontroversial and frequent cases of attribution error—the attributing of (...) |
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We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...) |
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I argue that theoretical developments in the study of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should occur alongside progress in moral psychology, particularly moral cognition. More specifically, I argue that Universal Moral Grammar (UMG), a model positing an innate, regulative, and universal moral faculty characterizable in terms of rules and principles, fulfills the role of the foundational model needed to usefully conceptualize the UDHR. As such, I provide a detailed account of UMG against competing models in moral psychology. Furthermore, (...) |
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Compassionate Moral Realism, by MarshallColin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 265 + xi. |
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Neuroethics is typically conceived of as consisting of two traditions: the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of moral judgment. However, recent work has sought to draw philosophical and ethical implications from the neuroscience of moral judgment. Such work, which concernsnormative moral neuroscience(NMN), is sufficiently distinct and complex to deserve recognition as a third tradition of neuroethics. Recognizing it as such can reduce confusion among researchers, eliminating conflations among both critics and proponents of NMN.This article identifies and unpacks some of (...) |
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Philosophical and empirical work on the nature of the emotions is extensive, and there are many theories of emotions. However, all agree that emotions are not knee jerk reactions to stimuli and are open to rational assessment or warrant. This paper's focus is on the condition or conditions for compassion as an emotion and the likelihood that it or they can be met in nursing practice. Thus, it is attempting to keep, as far as possible, compassion as an emotion separate (...) |
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While philosophers have discussed the emotion of contempt from antiquity to the present day, contempt has received less attention in psychological research. We review the defining features of contempt, both as a short-term emotion and as a more long-lasting sentiment. Contempt is similar to anger in that it may occur after social or moral transgressions, but it differs from anger in its appraisals, actions, and emotivational goals. Unlike anger, contempt arises when a person’s or group’s character is appraised as bad (...) |
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Recent debate in metaethics over evolutionary debunking arguments against morality has shown a tendency to abstract away from relevant empirical detail. Here, I engage the debate about Darwinian debunking of morality with relevant empirical issues. I present four conditions that must be met in order for it to be reasonable to expect an evolved cognitive faculty to be reliable: the environment, information, error, and tracking conditions. I then argue that these conditions are not met in the case of our evolved (...) |
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The Genealogy takes a historical form. But does the history play an essential role in Nietzsche's critique of modern morality? In this essay, I argue that the answer is yes. The Genealogy employs history in order to show that acceptance of modern morality was causally responsible for producing a dramatic change in our affects, drives, and perceptions. This change led agents to perceive actual increases in power as reductions in power, and actual decreases in power as increases in power. Moreover, (...) |
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The central question for this dissertation is, how do we do moral philosophy well from within a broadly naturalist framework? Its main goal is to lay the groundwork for a methodological approach to moral philosophy that integrates traditional, intuition-driven approaches to ethics with empirical approaches that employ empirical data from biology and cognitive science. Specifically, it explores what restrictions are placed on our moral theorizing by findings in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, and how we can integrate this (...) |
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The aim of this essay is to question the coherence of debates on moral enhancement by neurophysical or pharmaceutical means in the absence of a cogent conception of the object of moral scrutiny: namely, moral enhancement. I present two conceptions of moral enhancement—weak and strong—and argue that given the problem of acquiring a standard measure of moral enhancement, regardless of whether enhancement is present in its weak or strong form and regardless of whether one endorses moral realism or different forms (...) |
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This study attempts to compare ‘the ethical value positioning’ of students of Business and Management studies from India and Germany. A complete enumerative survey was conducted for management students using the Ethical Positioning Questionnaire of Forsyth. There were 134 respondents from India and 57 from Germany. The objective was to confer the differences in ethical positioning of students of two economically and culturally diverse nations. By the end of the research, it was constituted that both German and Indian students demonstrate (...) |
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The naturalistic approach to metaethics is sometimes identified with a supervenience theory relating moral properties to underlying descriptive properties, thereby securing the possibility of objective knowledge in morality as in chemistry. I reject this approach along with the purely anthropological approach which leads to an objectionable form of relativism. There is no single method for arriving at moral objectivity any more than there is a single method that has taken us from alchemy to modern chemistry. Rather, there is an ensemble (...) |
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In this article, I address problems associated with ‘Modernity’ and those encountered at the impasse of post-modernity and the newly named phenomenon of ‘post-secularism’. I consider more specifically what I call ‘moral emotions’ or essentially interpersonal emotions can tell us about who we are as persons, and what they tell us about our experience and concepts of freedom, normativity, power, and critique. The moral emotions, and retrieving the evidence of the ‘heart’, point to the possibility of contributing to the social (...) |
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Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) |
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ABSTRACT Ethical and political attitudes are not randomly distributed in a population. Attitudes of family members, for example, tend to be more similar than those of a random sample of the same size. In the fields of social psychology and political science, the historically standard explanation for these attitude distribution patterns was that social and political attitudes are a function of environmental factors like parental socialization and prevailing social norms. This received view is, however, complicated by more recent work in (...) |
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Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument’s empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for (...) |
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Abstract:In this article, we present a pragmatic approach to neuroethics, referring back to John Dewey and his articulation of the “common good” and its discovery through systematic methods. Pragmatic neuroethics bridges philosophy and social sciences and, at a very basic level, considers that ethics is not dissociable from lived experiences and everyday moral choices. We reflect on the integration between empirical methods and normative questions, using as our platform recent bioethical and neuropsychological research into moral cognition, action, and experience. Finally, (...) |
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This paper raises three objections to the argument presented by Ostritsch in The amoralist challenge to gaming and the gamer’s moral obligation, in which the amoralist’s mantra “it’s just a game” is viewed as an illegitimate rebuttal of all moral objections to video games. The first objection focuses on Ostritsch’s ‘strong sense’ of player enjoyment, which I argue is too crude, given the moral work it is meant to be doing. Next, I question the legitimacy of Ostritsch’s claim that certain (...) |
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The fact that humans cooperate with nonkin is something we take for granted, but this is an anomaly in the animal kingdom. Our species’ ability to behave prosocially may be based on human-unique psychological mechanisms. We argue here that these mechanisms include the ability to care about the welfare of others (other-regarding concerns), to “feel into” others (empathy), and to understand, adhere to, and enforce social norms (normativity). We consider how these motivational, emotional, and normative substrates of prosociality develop in (...) |
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In recent years, discussions of Buddhist ethics have increasingly drawn upon the concepts and tools of modern ethical theory, not only to compare Buddhist perspectives with Western moral theories, but also to assess the meta-ethical implications of Buddhist texts and their philosophical context. Philosophers aiming to defend the Madhyamaka framework in particular – its ethics and soteriology along with its logic and epistemology – have recently attempted to explain its combination of moral commitment and philosophical scepticism by appealing to various (...) |
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Abstract In this paper I set the debate between Kant and Schiller in terms of the role that an ideal of life can play within an autonomist ethic. I begin by examining the critical role Schiller gives to emotions in tackling specific motivational concerns in Kant's ethics. In the Kantian response I offer to these criticisms, I emphasise the role of metaphysics for a proper understanding of Kant's position whilst allowing that with respect to moral psychology, Kant and Schiller are (...) |
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Much recent work in meta-ethics and ethical theory has drawn extensively on claims about moral psychology. The goal of this paper is to provide a broad overview of some of these claims and the implications that certain philosophers are taking them to have for the plausibility of moral relativism. |
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I consider here the issue of whether and to what extent moral truths are absolute. My aim is to raise some new considerations in favor of moral relativism: the thesis that some moral statements can vary in truth-value depending on the moral standards at issue.1 2 This paper has three major components. First, I describe a new puzzle concerning the possibility of moral knowledge in light of expert disagreement. I argue that the best solution to this puzzle requires moral relativism. (...) |
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Sentimentalists believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. Epistemic sentimentalists subscribe to what I call the final-court-of-appeal view: emotional experience is ultimately necessary and can be sufficient for the justification of evaluative beliefs. This paper rejects this view defending a moderate version of rationalism that steers clear of the excesses of both “Stoic” rationalism and epistemic sentimentalism. We should grant that emotions play a significant epistemic role in justifying evaluations. At the same time, evaluative justification is not uniquely or (...) |
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This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence (...) |
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Esse artigo pretende responder à seguinte pergunta: Emoções e sentimentos são necessários para a moralidade? Essa questão será desdobrada em três outras: 1) Emoções e sentimentos são necessários para a determinação do correto moralmente?; 2) Emoções e sentimentos são necessários para a motivação moral?; e 3) Emoções e sentimentos são necessários para a ação moral? Para responder a essas questões, usa dois modelos distintos: o de Prinz, tal como apresentado no livro The emotional constructions of morals e o de Kant. (...) |
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Ever since Kant, moral philosophers have been more or less animated by the mission of discovering inescapable law-like rules that would provide a binding justification for morality. Recently, however, many have started to question whether this is possible and what, after all, this project could achieve. An alternative vision of the task of moral philosophy starts from the pragmatist idea that philosophizing begins and ends in human experiencing. It leads to a view where morality is seen as a “social technology” (...) |
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This article offers a critical assessment of Cristina Bicchieri and Jon Elster’s recent attempt to distinguish between social, moral, and quasi-moral norms. Although their typologies present interesting differences, they both distinguish types of norms on the basis of the way in which context, and especially other agents’ expectations and behavior, shapes one’s preference to comply with norms. We argue that both typologies should be abandoned because they fail to capture causally relevant features of norms. We nevertheless emphasize that both Bicchieri (...) |
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Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, these methods allow for more reflective and deliberative processing than has (...) |
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Recently it has been proposed that humans possess an innate, domain-specific moral faculty, and that this faculty might be fruitfully understood by drawing a close analogy with nativist theories in linguistics. This Linguistic Analogy hypothesizes that humans share a universal moral grammar. In this paper I argue that this conception is deeply flawed. After profiling a recent and appealing account of universal moral grammar, I suggest that recent empirical findings reveal a significant flaw, which takes the form of a dilemma: (...) |
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Sentimentalists claim that moral judgments essentially involve emotions. Some modern sentimentalists cite a growing body of neuropsychological evidence in support of this claim. Phillip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett argue that these “neurosentimentalists” rely on evidence taken from studies of non-agents, and thus ignore a fundamental constraint facing any account of decision making or judgment. If, as Gerrans and Kennett claim, only agents can make judgments, then theories of moral judgment cannot rely on studies of non-agents for evidential support. If this (...) |
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