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 (...) skills related to toolmaking, through social learning. If this is correct, the expansion of the normative domain beyond technique to encompass more abstract norms of fairness, reciprocity, ritual and kinship involved the elaboration of a basic platform for the guidance of skilled action by technical norms. This article motivates and defends this “skill hypothesis” for the origin of normative cognition and sets out various ways in which it could be empirically tested. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology of armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality of intuition in armchair philosophy have on experimentalist critiques of the latter? I distinguish two very different kinds of experimentalist critique: one critique requires the centrality of intuition; the other does not.

How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...) that species. On this framework, there is no single scale along which species can be ranked as more or less conscious. Rather, each species has its own distinctive consciousness profile. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Altruistic deception (or the telling of “white lies”) is common in humans. Does it also exist in non-human animals? On some definitions of deception, altruistic deception is impossible by definition, whereas others make it too easy by counting useful-but-ambiguous information as deceptive. I argue for a definition that makes altruistic deception possible in principle without trivializing it. On my proposal, deception requires the strategic exploitation of a receiver by a sender, where “exploitation” implies that the sender elicits a behaviour in (...) the receiver that is beneficial in a different type of situation and is expressed only because the signal raises the probability, from the receiver’s standpoint, of that type of situation. I then offer an example of a real signal that is deceptive in this sense, and yet potentially altruistic (and certainly cooperative): the purr call of the pied babbler. Fledglings associate purr calls with food, and adults exploit this learned association, in the absence of food, to lead fledglings away from predators following an alarm call. I conclude by considering why altruistic deception is apparently so rare in non-human animals. (shrink)

There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory-heavy, theory-neutral and theory-light. Theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory-light approach. At the core of the theory-light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the (...) hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness-linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking. (shrink)

This article responds to two arguments against ‘Epistemic Perceptualism’, the view that emotional experiences, as involving a perception of value, can constitute reasons for evaluative belief. It first provides a basic account of emotional experience, and then introduces concepts relevant to the epistemology of emotional experience, such as the nature of a reason for belief, non-inferentiality, and prima facie vs. conclusive reasons, which allow for the clarification of Epistemic Perceptualism in terms of the Perceptual Justificatory View. It then challenges two (...) arguments which purport to show that emotional experience is not a source of reasons for evaluative belief. The first argument claims that because normative why-questions are always appropriate in the case of emotions, then emotions can never be conclusive reasons for corresponding evaluative beliefs. The second purports to show that appeal to emotional experience as a source of reasons for evaluative beliefs renders emotions problematically self-justifying, and since emotions cannot be self-justifying, they cannot provide any sort of reason for corresponding evaluative beliefs. This article responds to these arguments, and in doing so shows there is still much to be learned about the epistemology of emotional experience by drawing analogies with perceptual experience. (shrink)

This article offers an account of moods as distinctive kinds of personal level affective-evaluative states, which are both intentional and rationally intelligible in specific ways. The account contrasts with those who claim moods are non-intentional, and so also arational. Section 1 provides a conception of intentionality and distinguishes moods, as occurrent experiential states, from other states in the affective domain. Section 2 argues moods target the subject’s total environment presented in a specific evaluative light through felt valenced attitudes (the Mood-Intentionality (...) thesis). Section 3 argues some moods are experienced as rationally intelligible responses, and so epistemically appropriate, to the way ‘the world’ presents itself (the Mood-Intelligibility thesis). Finally, section 4 discusses the epistemology of moods. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...) we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the (...) debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human organoid biobanking, the locus of donor autonomy has been identified in processes of consent. The problem is that, by focusing on consent, biobanking processes preclude adequate engagement with donor autonomy because they are unable to adequately recognise or respond to factors that determine authentic choice. This is particularly problematic in biobanking contexts associated with organoid research or the clinical application of organoids because, given the probability of unforeseen and varying purposes for which (...) a donor’s organoids could be employed and given the different ways in which a donor can relate to her biospecimens, a donor can value her organoids differently in different contexts and her reasons for autonomously permitting use of her cells and tissues in one case may not support an autonomous decision in another. In response, this paper has three aims: firstly, to make the case for why organoid biobanks ought to respect donor autonomy conceived as authentic choice; secondly, to explore the autonomy-respecting limits of established and widely prevalent models of biobank consent; and thirdly, to propose certain conditions that organoid biobanks ought to support or facilitate in order to respect donor autonomy. (shrink)

In debates about animal sentience, the precautionary principle is often invoked. The idea is that when the evidence of sentience is inconclusive, we should “give the animal the benefit of the doubt” or “err on the side of caution” in formulating animal protection legislation. Yet there remains confusion as to whether it is appropriate to apply the precautionary principle in this context, and, if so, what “applying the precautionary principle” means in practice regarding the burden of proof for animal sentience. (...) Here I construct a version of the precautionary principle tailored to the question of animal sentience together with a practical framework for implementing it. I explain and defend the key features of this framework, argue that it is well-aligned with current practice in animal welfare science, and consider and reject a number of influential counterarguments to the use of precautionary reasoning in this area. (shrink)

Recently, more attention has been paid to the nature and value of the intellectual virtue of epistemic autonomy. One underexplored issue concerns how epistemic autonomy is related to other intellectual virtues. Plausibly, epistemic autonomy is closely related to a number of intellectual virtues like curiosity, inquisitiveness, intellectual perseverance, and intellectual courage to name just a few. Here, however, I will examine the relation between epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility. I will argue that epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility bear an interesting (...) relationship to one another in that they are interconnected and mutually supporting intellectual virtues. In sections 2 and 3 I will provide a brief overview of the predominant accounts of intellectual humility (section 2) and epistemic autonomy (section 3) in the literature. With an understanding of these intellectual virtues in hand, we will examine their relationship of mutual support in section 4. Section 5 will explore a challenge to this relationship coming from the epistemology of disagreement, and section 6 concludes. (shrink)

While puzzles concerning the epistemic significance of disagreement are typically motivated by looking at the widespread and persistent disagreements we are aware of, almost all of the literature on the epistemic significance of disagreement has focused on cases idealized peer disagreement. This fact might itself be puzzling since it doesn’t seem that we ever encounter disagreements that meet the relevant idealized conditions. In this paper I hope to somewhat rectify this matter. I begin by closely examining what an idealized case (...) of peer disagreement looks like and what the Equal Weight View (EWV) of disagreement claims about the epistemic significance of such disagreements. After briefly defending the verdicts of the EWV in idealized disagreements I proceed to unpack the implications of stripping away the idealized conditions. In doing I show both why it is important to focus on idealized cases of peer disagreement and what we can learn from such cases that applies to the everyday cases of disagreement of which we are very familiar. (shrink)

From mitochondria to meerkats, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the early 1960s W. D. Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves. He introduced three key innovations - now known as Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness - and his pioneering work kick-started a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical foundations and future prospects of that program. [Note: only the Introduction (...) is available to download.]. (shrink)

The notion that natural selection is a process of fitness maximization gets a bad press in population genetics, yet in other areas of biology the view that organisms behave as if attempting to maximize their fitness remains widespread. Here I critically appraise the prospects for reconciliation. I first distinguish four varieties of fitness maximization. I then examine two recent developments that may appear to vindicate at least one of these varieties. The first is the ‘new’ interpretation of Fisher's fundamental theorem (...) of natural selection, on which the theorem is exactly true for any evolving population that satisfies some minimal assumptions. The second is the Formal Darwinism project, which forges links between gene frequency change and optimal strategy choice. In both cases, I argue that the results fail to establish a biologically significant maximization principle. I conclude that it may be a mistake to look for universal maximization principles justified by theory alone. A more promising approach may be to find maximization principles that apply conditionally and to show that the conditions were satisfied in the evolution of particular traits. (shrink)

Animal welfare scientists face an acute version of the problem of inductive risk, since they must choose whether to affirm attributions of mental states to animals in advisory contexts, knowing their decisions hold consequences for animal welfare. In such contexts, the burden of proof should be sensitive to the consequences of error, but a framework for setting appropriate burdens of proof is lacking. Through reflection on two cases—pain and cognitive enrichment—I arrive at a tentative framework based on the principle of (...) expected welfare maximization. I then discuss the limitations of this framework and the questions it leaves open. (shrink)

Human neural organoid research is advancing rapidly. As Greely notes in the target article, this progress presents an “onrushing ethical dilemma.” We can’t rule out the possibility that suff...

In this article, I argue that depression and suicide are natural kinds insofar as they are classes of abnormal behavior underwritten by sets of stable biological mechanisms. In particular, depression and suicide are neurobiological kinds characterized by disturbances in serotonin functioning that affect various brain areas (i.e., the amygdala, anterior cingulate, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus). The significance of this argument is that the natural (biological) basis of depression and suicide allows for reliable projectable inferences (i.e., predictions) to be made about (...) individual members of a kind. In the context of assisted suicide, inferences about the decision-making capacity of depressed individuals seeking physician-assisted suicide are of special interest. I examine evidence that depression can hamper the decision-making capacity of individuals seeking assisted suicide and discuss some implications. (shrink)

Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. -/- It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained in a (...) way independently of moral judgments about sexual wrongs. Consequently, if there is as tight a connection between consent and sexual violation as many people think there is, there is good reason to suppose that that connection must ultimately explain consent in terms of sexual wronging, rather than vice versa. The paper highlights some costs and drawbacks to this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma in sexual ethics. One central upshot of the argument will be that mainstream accounts of sexual ethics fail in their explanatory ambitions. Consent cannot play its canonical explanatory role. (shrink)

Emotion theory includes attempts to reduce or assimilate emotions to states such as bodily feelings, beliefs-desire combinations, and evaluative judgements. Resistance to such approaches is motivated by the claim that emotions possess a sui generis phenomenology. Uriah Kriegel defends a new form of emotion reductivism which avoids positing irreducible emotional phenomenology by specifying emotions’ phenomenal character in terms of a combination of other phenomenologies. This article argues Kriegel’s approach, and similar proposals, are unsuccessful, since typical emotional experiences are constituted by (...) sui generis feelings towards value. (shrink)

Suppose that Ann says, “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” Her audience may well agree. Her knowledge ascription may seem true. But now suppose that Ben—in a different context—also says “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” His audience may well disagree. His knowledge ascription may seem false. Indeed, a number of philosophers have claimed that people’s intuitions about knowledge ascriptions are context sensitive, in the sense that the very same knowledge ascription can seem true (...) in one conversational context but false in another. This purported fact about people’s intuitions serves as one of the main pieces of evidence for epistemic contextualism. (shrink)

Consciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or “type-B”) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept of phenomenal consciousness is radically indeterminate between a (...) neuronal-level property that is distinctive to mammals and a high-level functional property that is much more widely shared. This would leave many non-mammalian animals (such as birds, fish, insects and octopuses) with indeterminate moral status. There are ways to manage this radical moral indeterminacy, but all of these ways lead to profoundly troubling consequences. (shrink)

In psychiatry, pharmacological drugs play an important experimental role in attempts to identify the neurobiological causes of mental disorders. Besides being developed in applied contexts as potential treatments for patients with mental disorders, pharmacological drugs play a crucial role in research contexts as experimental instruments that facilitate the formulation and revision of neurobiological theories of psychopathology. This paper examines the various epistemic functions that pharmacological drugs serve in the discovery, refinement, testing, and elaboration of neurobiological theories of mental disorders. I (...) articulate this thesis with reference to the history of antipsychotic drugs and the evolution of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that interventions with psychiatric patients through the medium of antipsychotic drugs provide researchers with information and evidence about the neurobiological causes of schizophrenia. This analysis highlights the importance of pharmacological drugs as research tools in the generation of psychiatric knowledge and the dynamic relationship between practical and theoretical contexts in psychiatry. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to the recent debate about whether rationality is normative – that is, very roughly, about whether we should have attitudes which fit together in a coherent way. I begin by explaining an initial problem – the “detaching problem” – that arises on the assumption that we should have coherent attitudes. I then explain the prominent “wide-scope” solution to this problem, and some of the central objections to it. I end by considering the options that arise (...) if we reject the wide-scope solution. (shrink)

In this chapter I develop and motivate and account of epistemic autonomy as an intellectual character virtue. In Section one, I clarify the concept of an intellectual virtue and character intellectual virtues in particular. In Section two, I clear away some misconceptions about epistemic autonomy to better focus on our target. In Section three, I examine and evaluate several extant accounts of the virtue of epistemic autonomy, noting problems with each. In Section four, I provide my positive account of the (...) virtue of epistemic autonomy and explain how it meets the desiderata for such an account while avoiding the problems with extant accounts. Finally, in Section five, I fill the account out by digging into the factors that guide epistemically autonomous agents in having an appropriate reliance on their own thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I lay out, argue for, and defend ethical Mooreanism. In essence, the view says that some moral propositions are Moorean propositions and thus are epistemically superior to the conjunctions of the premises of skeptical arguments to the contrary. In Sect. 1 I explain Mooreanism and then ethical Mooreanism. In Sect. 2 I argue for ethical Mooreanism by noting a number of important epistemic parities that hold between certain moral truths and standard Moorean facts. In Sect. 3 I (...) defend ethical Mooreanism against the objection that moral propositions are too epistemically dissimilar to standard Moorean facts to count as Moorean truths. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to stimulate discussion of the framework by providing a primer on its key claims and a clear statement of its main empirical (...) predictions. (shrink)

In The Life of a Style, Jonathan Gilmore claims that such narrative developments inhere in the history of art itself.By exploring such topics as the discovery ...

Trent Dougherty argues (contra Jonathan Matheson) that when taking into consideration the probabilities involving skeptical theism (ST) and gratuitous evils, an agent may reasonably affirm both ST and that gratuitous evils exist. In other words, Dougherty thinks that assigning a greater than .5 probability to ST is insufficient to defeat the commonsense problem of evil. I argue that Dougherty’s response assumes, incorrectly, that ST functions solely as an evidential defeater, and that, when understood as a closure of inquiry defeater, (...) ST may still defeat reasonable belief in gratuitous evils, even in the face of strong evidence that gratuitous evils exist. (shrink)

Built-in decision thresholds for AI diagnostics are ethically problematic, as patients may differ in their attitudes about the risk of false-positive and false-negative results, which will require that clinicians assess patient values.

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, (...) for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. (shrink)

Spontaneous freedom, the freedom of unplanned and unscripted activity enjoyed by “free spirits,” is central to everyday talk about “freedom.” Yet the freedom of spontaneity is absent from contemporary moral philosophers’ theories of freedom. This article begins to remedy the philosophical neglect of spontaneous freedom. I offer an account of the nature of spontaneous freedom and make a case for its value. I go on to show how an understanding of spontaneous freedom clarifies the free will debate by helping to (...) make sense of the libertarian claim that compatibilist varieties of freedom do not allow for genuine novelty and creativity. (shrink)

It would be unwise to dismiss the possibility of human brain organoids developing sentience. However, scepticism about this idea is appropriate when considering current organoids. It is a point of consensus that a brain-dead human is not sentient, and current organoids lack a functioning brainstem. There are nonetheless troubling early warning signs, suggesting organoid research may create forms of sentience in the near future. To err on the side of caution, researchers with very different views about the neural basis of (...) sentience should unite behind the “brainstem rule”: if a neural organoid develops or innervates a functioning brainstem that regulates arousal and leads to sleep-wake cycles, then it is a sentience candidate. If organoid research leads to the creation of sentience candidates, a moratorium or indefinite ban on the creation of the relevant type of organoid may be appropriate. A different way forward, more consistent with existing approaches to animal research, would be to require ethical review and harm-benefit analysis for all research on sentience candidates. (shrink)

I reflect on the commentaries on my ‘skill hypothesis’ from Andrews/westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton. I discuss the difference between normative cognition and the broader category of action-guiding representation, and I reflect on the relationship between joint intentionality and normative cognition. I then consider Sterelny and Railton’s variants on the skill hypothesis, which highlight some important areas where future evidence could help us refine the account: the relative importance of on-the-fly skill execution vs. longer-term strategizing, the relative importance of toolmaking (...) vs. collaborative foraging, and the question of whether norms are encoded in control models themselves or in the goals and ideals that our control models help us pursue. (shrink)

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only (...) for untrained participants, but also for academic researchers and even in those who study happiness specifically. Studies 2 and 3 then respectively ask whether this effect may be explained by general motivational biases or beliefs in a just world. In both cases, we find evidence against these explanations. Study 4 shows that the impact of moral judgments cannot be explained by changes in the perception of descriptive psychological states. Finally, Study 5 compares the impact of moral and non-moral value, and provides evidence that unlike non-moral value, moral value is part of the criteria that govern the ordinary concept of happiness. Taken together, these studies provide a specific explanation of how and why the ordinary concept of happiness deviates from the definition used by researchers studying happiness. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept a response constraint on normative reasons: that p is a reason for you to φ only if you are able to φ for the reason that p. This constraint offers a natural way to cash out the familiar and intuitive thought that reasons must be able to guide us, and has been put to work as a premise in a range of influential arguments in ethics and epistemology. However, the constraint requires interpretation and faces putative counter-examples due (...) to Julia Markovits, Mark Schroeder, and others. This paper develops and motivates an interpretation of the response constraint that avoids the putative counter-examples. (shrink)

Many epidemics consist in individuals spreading infection to others. From the population perspective, they also have population characteristics important in modeling, explaining, and intervening in epidemics. I analyze epidemiology’s contemporary population perspective through the example of epidemics by examining two central principles attributed to Geoffrey Rose: a distinction between the causes of cases and the causes of incidence, and between “high-risk” and “population” strategies of prevention. Both principles require revision or clarification to capture the sense in which they describe distinct (...) perspectives on the same phenomenon, each perspective capturing a different level of contrastive analysis. (shrink)

When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this paper, we suggest that norm violations also affect the causality attributed to other agents, a phenomenon we refer to as "causal superseding." We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 provide an initial demonstration of the causal superseding effect and distinguish it from previously studied effects. Experiment 3 shows that this causal (...) superseding effect is dependent on a particular event structure, following a prediction of our counterfactual model. Experiment 4 demonstrates that causal superseding can occur with violations of non-moral norms. We propose a model of the superseding effect based on the idea of counterfactual sufficiency. (shrink)

Past work has demonstrated that people’s moral judgments can influence their judgments in a number of domains that might seem to involve straightforward matters of fact, including judgments about freedom, causation, the doing/allowing distinction, and intentional action. The present studies explore whether the effect of morality in these four domains can be explained by changes in the relevance of alternative possibilities. More precisely, we propose that moral judgment influences the degree to which people regard certain alternative possibilities as relevant, which (...) in turn impacts intuitions about freedom, causation, doing/allowing, and intentional action. Employing the stimuli used in previous research, Studies 1a, 2a, 3a, and 4a show that the relevance of alternatives is influenced by moral judgments and mediates the impact of morality on non-moral judgments. Studies 1b, 2b, 3b, and 4b then provide direct empirical evidence for the link between the relevance of alternatives and judgments in these four domains by manipulating (rather than measuring) the relevance of alternative possibilities. Lastly, Study 5 demonstrates that the critical mechanism is not whether alternative possibilities are considered, but whether they are regarded as relevant. These studies support a unified framework for understanding the impact of morality across these very different kinds of judgments. (shrink)

The most pressing difficulty coherentism faces is, I believe, the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs. In a nutshell, there are cases in which our beliefs appear to be both fully rational and justified, and yet the contents of the beliefs are inconsistent, often knowingly so. This fact contradicts the seemingly obvious idea that a minimal requirement for coherence is logical consistency. Here, I present a solution to one version of this problem.

In this paper, we claim that, if you justifiably believe that you ought to perform some act, it follows that you ought to perform that act. In the first half, we argue for this claim by reflection on what makes for correct reasoning from beliefs about what you ought to do. In the second half, we consider a number of objections to this argument and its conclusion. In doing so, we arrive at another argument for the view that justified beliefs (...) about what you ought to do must be true, based in part on the idea that the epistemic and practical domains are uniform, in a sense we spell out. We conclude by sketching possible implications of our discussion for the debates over what is wrong with akrasia and pragmatic encroachment on justified belief and knowledge. (shrink)

Introduces contextualism about knowledge ascriptions, and provides a brief summary of the contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism.