We construct a machine that knows its own code, at the price of not knowing its own factivity.

We study the structure of families of theories in the language of arithmetic extended to allow these families to refer to one another and to themselves. If a theory contains schemata expressing its own truth and expressing a specific Turing index for itself, and contains some other mild axioms, then that theory is untrue. We exhibit some families of true self-referential theories that barely avoid this forbidden pattern.

We argue that C. Darwin and more recently W. Hennig worked at times under the simplifying assumption of an eternal biosphere. So motivated, we explicitly consider the consequences which follow mathematically from this assumption, and the infinite graphs it leads to. This assumption admits certain clusters of organisms which have some ideal theoretical properties of species, shining some light onto the species problem. We prove a dualization of a law of T.A. Knight and C. Darwin, and sketch a decomposition result (...) involving the internodons of D. Kornet, J. Metz and H. Schellinx. A further goal of this paper is to respond to B. Sturmfels’ question, “Can biology lead to new theorems?”. (shrink)

Reinhardt’s conjecture, a formalization of the statement that a truthful knowing machine can know its own truthfulness and mechanicalness, was proved by Carlson using sophisticated structural results about the ordinals and transfinite induction just beyond the first epsilon number. We prove a weaker version of the conjecture, by elementary methods and transfinite induction up to a smaller ordinal.

Elementary patterns of resemblance notate ordinals up to the ordinal of Pi^1_1-CA_0. We provide ordinal multiplication and exponentiation algorithms using these notations.

Prior scholarly approaches to meaningful work have largely fallen into two camps. One focuses on identifying how work can contribute to a meaningful life. The other studies the antecedents and outcomes of workers experiencing their work as meaningful. Neither of these approaches, however, captures what people look for when they seek meaningful work—or so I argue. In this paper, I give a new, commitment-based account of meaningful work by focusing on the reasons people have to choose meaningful work over other (...) options. I draw on philosopher Ruth Chang’s account of voluntarist reasons (reasons that arise from an act of the will) to argue that commitments can create distinctive reasons to pursue certain work. It is the presence of these distinctive reasons that makes work meaningful. (shrink)

Decision theory has had a long-standing history in the behavioural and social sciences as a tool for constructing good approximations of human behaviour. Yet as artificially intelligent systems (AIs) grow in intellectual capacity and eventually outpace humans, decision theory becomes evermore important as a model of AI behaviour. What sort of decision procedure might an AI employ? In this work, I propose that policy-based causal decision theory (PCDT), which places a primacy on the decision-relevance of predictors and simulations of agent (...) behaviour, may be such a procedure. I compare this account to the recently-developed functional decision theory (FDT), which is motivated by similar concerns. I also address potentially counterintuitive features of PCDT, such as its refusal to condition on observations made at certain times. (shrink)

Loyalty is considered central to people’s moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across 7 studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of features associated (...) with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while US participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that difference in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the United States sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify non-loyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. (shrink)

Do we live in a computer simulation? I will present an argument that the results of a certain experiment constitute empirical evidence that we do not live in, at least, one type of simulation. The type of simulation ruled out is very specific. Perhaps that is the price one must pay to make any kind of Popperian progress.

According to Kantian moral religion, because there is a duty to promote the highest good, we are warranted in believing in God and immortality. However, this article shows that the duty to promote the highest good is incoherent, and that popular conceptualizations of the highest good cannot avoid this incoherence. After arguing, additionally, against attempts to ground Kantian moral religion on the highest good in some role other than the object of duty, it is shown that Kant seems to have (...) been aware of the original problem, suggesting an explanation for why he abandoned the highest good around 1800. (shrink)

Fragmentalism was originally introduced as a new A-theory of time. It was further refined and discussed, and different developments of the original insight have been proposed. In a celebrated paper, Jonathan Simon contends that fragmentalism delivers a new realist account of the quantum state—which he calls conservative realism—according to which: the quantum state is a complete description of a physical system, the quantum state is grounded in its terms, and the superposition terms are themselves grounded in local goings-on about the (...) system in question. We will argue that fragmentalism, at least along the lines proposed by Simon, does not offer a new, satisfactory realistic account of the quantum state. This raises the question about whether there are some other viable forms of quantum fragmentalism. (shrink)

Philosophical work in the ethics of thought focuses heavily on the ethics of belief, with, in recent years, a particular emphasis on the ways in which we might wrong other people either through our beliefs about them, or our failure to believe what they tell us. Yet in our own lives we often want not merely to be believed, but rather to be understood by others. What does it take to understand another person? In this paper, I provide an account (...) of interpersonal understanding that speaks to this widespread human desire to be understood by others. On the view I defend, to be understood by another person is for them to see our motivating reasons as justifying reasons, whether or not they actually take our reasons to have that normative force. I then provide an explanation of why such understanding is valuable in our lives, which emphasizes how being understood by another person is a way of being more fully with them. (shrink)

The Generality Problem is widely recognized to be a serious problem for reliabilist theories of justification. James R. Beebe's Statistical Solution is one of only a handful of attempted solutions that has garnered serious attention in the literature. In their recent response to Beebe, Julien Dutant and Erik J. Olsson successfully refute Beebe's Statistical Solution. This paper presents a New Statistical Solution that countenances Dutant and Olsson's objections, dodges the serious problems that trouble rival solutions, and retains the theoretical virtues (...) that made Beebe's solution so attractive in the first place. There indeed exists a principled, rigorous, conceptually sparse, and plausible solution to the Generality Problem: it is the New Statistical Solution. (shrink)

In recent years, the number of studies examining mind wandering has increased considerably, and research on the topic has spread widely across various domains of psychological research. Although the term “mind wandering” has been used to refer to various cognitive states, researchers typically operationalize mind wandering in terms of “task-unrelated thought” (TUT). Research on TUT has shed light on the various task features that require people’s attention, and on the consequences of task inattention. Important methodological and conceptual complications do persist, (...) however, in current investigations of TUT. As we argue, these complications may be dampening the development of a more nuanced scientific account of TUT. Here, we outline three of the more prominent methodological and conceptual complications in the literature on TUT, and we discuss potential directions for researchers to take as they move forward in their investigations of TUT. (shrink)

The verb ‘to know’ can be used both in ascriptions of propositional knowledge and ascriptions of knowledge of acquaintance. In the formal epistemology literature, the former use of ‘know’ has attracted considerable attention, while the latter is typically regarded as derivative. This attitude may be unsatisfactory for those philosophers who, like Russell, are not willing to think of knowledge of acquaintance as a subsidiary or dependent kind of knowledge. In this paper we outline a logic of knowledge of acquaintance in (...) which ascriptions like ‘Mary knows Smith’ are regarded as formally interesting in their own right, remaining neutral on their relation to ascriptions of propositional knowledge. The resulting logical framework, which is based on Hintikka’s modal approach to epistemic logic, provides a fresh perspective on various issues and notions at play in the philosophical debate on acquaintance. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma consists of three intuitively plausible but conflicting assertions: (i) Virtual murder is morally permissible. (ii) Virtual child molestation is morally forbidden. (iii) There is no relevant moral difference between virtual murder and virtual child molestation in computer games. Numerous attempts to resolve (or dissolve) the Gamer’s Dilemma line the field of computer game ethics. Mostly, the phenomenon is approached using expressivist argumentation: Reprehensible virtual actions express something immoral in their performance but are not immoral by themselves. Consequentialists, (...) on the other hand, claim that the immorality of virtual actions arises from their harmful consequences. I argue that both approaches have serious difficulties meeting the moral challenge posed by the Gamer’s Dilemma. They tend to confuse the morality of in-game actions either with the morality of their real-world counterparts or with the morality of games as objects. Following this critical analysis, I will develop a Kantian argument and defend it against two objections. So far, deontological responses to the Gamer’s Dilemma have been sought in vain. Yet, with Kant, its moral challenge can be met by looking at the gamer’s reasons. From this perspective, the Gamer’s Dilemma is based on a false assumption: the moral status of gaming acts does not derive from a normative equation with their real-world counterparts but only from their justifications. (shrink)

In response to the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have, with very few exceptions, enacted sweeping restrictive lockdown policies that impede citizens’ freedom to move, work, and assemble. This paper critically responds to the central arguments for restrictive lockdown legislation. We build our critique on the following assumption: public policy that enjoys virtually unanimous support worldwide should be justified by uncontroversial moral principles. We argue that that the virtually unanimous support in favor of restrictive lockdowns is not adequately (...) justified by the arguments given in favor of them. Importantly, this is not to say that states ought not impose restrictive lockdown measures, but rather that the extent of the acceptance of these measures is not proportionate to the strength of the arguments for lockdowns. -/- We begin by exploring the case for restrictive lockdowns. We first argue that several of the principles that are used to justify the lockdowns yield unexpectedly revisionary implications for other political problems that many would be unwilling to accept. We then outline what we consider the strongest argument for a lockdown—namely, that its net welfare benefits are great enough to defeat the moral presumption against restricting citizens’ civil liberties to move, work, and assemble. However, we give a number of reasons for doubting that the lockdown’s net welfare benefits are, in fact, sufficiently high to defeat the presumption against it. (shrink)

Jennifer Saul argues that the evidence from the literature on implicit biases entails a form of skepticism. In this paper, I argue that Saul faces a dilemma: her argument is either self-defeating, or it does not yield a skeptical conclusion. For Saul, both results are unacceptable; thus, her argument fails.

The conventional wisdom regarding the aims and shortcomings of Kantian constructivism is mistaken. The aim of metaethical constructivism is not to provide a naturalistic account of the objectivity of normative facts by deriving substantive morality from a conception of agency so thin as to be uncontroversial (a task at which it is generally regarded to have failed). Its aim is to explain the “grip” that normative facts have on us—to avoid what I call the problem of normative alienation. So understood, (...) Kantian constructivism faces two problems: that determinate normative facts cannot be derived from agency and that its individualistic conception of agency cannot account for the sociality of morality. I propose and elaborate a social conception of agency that is better able to address the latter problem while still avoiding normative alienation, and evaluate two different strategies for responding to the former problem. (shrink)

I present an argument that for any computer-simulated civilization we design, the mathematical knowledge recorded by that civilization has one of two limitations. It is untrustworthy, or it is weaker than our own mathematical knowledge. This is paradoxical because it seems that nothing prevents us from building in all sorts of advantages for the inhabitants of said simulation.

In this paper I defend the traditional interpretations of Kant’s Formula of a Law of Nature from recent attacks leveled by Faviola Rivera-Castro, James Furner, Ido Geiger, Pauline Kleingeld and Sven Nyholm. After a short introduction, the paper is divided into four main sections. In the first, I set out the basics of the three traditional interpretations, the Logical Contradiction Interpretation, the Practical Contradiction Interpretation and the Teleological Contradiction Interpretation. In the second, I examine the work of Geiger, Kleingeld and (...) Nyholm: these three commentators reject the traditional interpretations entirely, but I argue that this rejection is ill-founded. In the third and fourth, I take a detailed look at Furner’s work, work in which he seeks to revise (rather than reject) the traditional interpretations. I argue that, despite his more modest aims, Furner’s revision is also ill-founded. (shrink)

I argue that the social dimension of alienation, as discussed by Williams and Railton, has been underappreciated. The lesson typically drawn from their exchange is that moral theory poses a threat to the internal integrity of the agent, but there is a parallel risk that moral theory will implicitly construe agents as constitutively alienated from one another. I argue that a satisfying account of agency will need to make room for what I call ‘genuine ethical contact’ with others, both as (...) concrete objects in the world external to ourselves and as subjects who can recognize us reciprocally. (shrink)

The idea that time does not exist is, for many, unthinkable: time must exist. Almost every experience we have tells us so. There has been plenty of debate around what time is like, but not whether it exists. The goal of this book is to make the absence of time thinkable. Time might not exist. Beginning with an empirically flavoured examination of the 'folk' concept of time, the book explores the implications this has for our understanding of agency, and the (...) extent to which our best physics and best metaphysics are compatible with a timeless conception of reality. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends on (...) transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

Scholars have often thought that a monistic reading of Aristotle’s definition of the human good – in particular, one on which “best and most teleios virtue” refers to theoretical wisdom – cannot follow from the premises of the ergon argument. I explain how a monistic reading can follow from the premises, and I argue that this interpretation gives the correct rationale for Aristotle’s definition. I then explain that even though the best and most teleios virtue must be a single virtue, (...) that virtue could in principle be a whole virtue that arises from the combination of all the others. I also clarify that the definition of the human good aims at capturing the nature of human eudaimonia only in its primary case. (shrink)

In the Laws, Plato argues that the legislator should attempt to persuade people to voluntarily obey the laws. This persuasion is accomplished through use of legislative preludes. Preludes (also called preambles) are short arguments written into the legal code, which precede laws and give reasons to follow them. In this paper, I argue that Plato’s use of persuasive preludes shows that he endorses the core features of a public reason theory of political justification. Many philosophers argue that Plato’s political philosophy (...) is deeply at odds with contemporary liberal political philosophy. While Plato certainly does not affirm (and even rejects) some of the main features of liberalism, if it could be shown that he endorses some account of public reason (which is a liberal idea to its core), this would suggest that there is more in common between Plato and liberalism than many philosophers think. Furthermore, if combined with the work of philosophers, like C.C.W. Taylor, this could form a cumulative case against those who argue that there is little in common between Plato’s political philosophy and liberalism. In short, by showing that Plato endorses the core features of public reason, I endeavor to show that there is more in common between Plato and liberalism than is often thought. (shrink)

This article challenges the association between realist methodology and ideals of legitimacy. Many who seek a more “realistic” or “political” approach to political theory replace the familiar orientation towards a state of justice with a structurally similar orientation towards a state of legitimacy. As a result, they fail to provide more reliable practical guidance, and wrongly displace radical demands. Rather than orienting action towards any state of affairs, I suggest that a more practically useful approach to political theory would directly (...) address judgments, by comparing the concrete possibilities for action faced by real political actors. (shrink)

There is an old meta-philosophical worry: very roughly, metaphysical theories have no observational consequences and so the study of metaphysics has no value. The worry has been around in some form since the rise of logical positivism in the early twentieth century but has seen a bit of a renaissance recently. In this paper, I provide an apology for metaphysics in the face of this kind of concern. The core of the argument is this: pure mathematics detaches from science in (...) much the same manner as metaphysics and yet it is valuable nonetheless. The source of value enjoyed by pure mathematics extends to metaphysics as well. Accordingly, if one denies that metaphysics has value, then one is forced to deny that pure mathematics has value. The argument places an added burden on the sceptic of metaphysics. If one truly believes that metaphysics is worthless (as some philosophers do), then one must give up on pure mathematics as well. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

Can an AGI create a more intelligent AGI? Under idealized assumptions, for a certain theoretical type of intelligence, our answer is: “Not without outside help”. This is a paper on the mathematical structure of AGI populations when parent AGIs create child AGIs. We argue that such populations satisfy a certain biological law. Motivated by observations of sexual reproduction in seemingly-asexual species, the Knight-Darwin Law states that it is impossible for one organism to asexually produce another, which asexually produces another, and (...) so on forever: that any sequence of organisms (each one a child of the previous) must contain occasional multi-parent organisms, or must terminate. By proving that a certain measure (arguably an intelligence measure) decreases when an idealized parent AGI single-handedly creates a child AGI, we argue that a similar Law holds for AGIs. (shrink)

Samuel Kerstein’s recent (2013) How To Treat Persons is an ambitious attempt to develop a new, broadly Kantian account of what it is to treat others as mere means and what it means to act in accordance with others’ dignity. His project is explicitly nonfoundationalist: his interpretation stands or falls on its ability to accommodate our pretheoretic intuitions, and he does an admirable job of handling carefully a range of well fleshed out and sometimes subtle examples. In what follows, (...) I shall give a quick summary of the chapters and then say two good things about the book and one critical thing. (shrink)

We define a notion of the intelligence level of an idealized mechanical knowing agent. This is motivated by efforts within artificial intelligence research to define real-number intelligence levels of compli- cated intelligent systems. Our agents are more idealized, which allows us to define a much simpler measure of intelligence level for them. In short, we define the intelligence level of a mechanical knowing agent to be the supremum of the computable ordinals that have codes the agent knows to be codes (...) of computable ordinals. We prove that if one agent knows certain things about another agent, then the former necessarily has a higher intelligence level than the latter. This allows our intelligence no- tion to serve as a stepping stone to obtain results which, by themselves, are not stated in terms of our intelligence notion (results of potential in- terest even to readers totally skeptical that our notion correctly captures intelligence). As an application, we argue that these results comprise evidence against the possibility of intelligence explosion (that is, the no- tion that sufficiently intelligent machines will eventually be capable of designing even more intelligent machines, which can then design even more intelligent machines, and so on). (shrink)

In this paper I provide a novel argument for scientific realism. In contrast to most recent defenses of SR, my defense of SR does not rely on the no-miracles argument. Instead, I take a more unconventional approach: I focus on the different kinds of justification available to different individuals in relation to different kinds of propositions. I maintain that this alternative focus shows that most people are warranted in believing many propositions about unobservables. The paper is divided into three main (...) sections. In the first, I rehearse the main moves in the recent debate about SR. In the second, I argue that the discussion in section one enables us to see that most of the arguments in the recent debate about SR mistake their target: instead of being about SR, they are about meta-SR. I argue that what I call the JJ-principle should be rejected and, further, that if the JJ-principle is rejected, then meta-SR may be cleaved from SR. This enables me to advance to a position I call thin realism in the third and final section of the paper. (shrink)

Are the real numbers rich enough to measure intelligence? We generalize a result of Alexander and Hutter about the so-called Legg-Hutter intelligence measures of reinforcement learning agents. Using the generalized result, we exhibit a paradox: in one particular version of the Legg-Hutter intelligence measure, certain agents all have intelligence 0, even though in a certain sense some of them outperform others. We show that this paradox disappears if we vary the Legg-Hutter intelligence measure to be hyperreal-valued rather than real-valued.

Contemporary critics of the administrative state are right to highlight the dangers of vesting too much power in a centralized bureaucracy removed from popular oversight and accountability. Too often neglected in this literature, however, are the dangers of vesting too little power in a centralized state, which enables dominant groups to further expand their social and economic advantages through decentralized means. This article seeks to synthesize these concerns, understanding them as reflecting the same underlying danger of state capture. It then (...) articulates a set of heuristics for the design of public and administrative institutions, which aim at minimizing the risks of capture from both public and private sources. By following these heuristics, it claims, we can successfully employ the administrative state as a weapon against concentrated private power, rather than allowing it to serve as a tool of dominant groups. (shrink)

Legg and Hutter, as well as subsequent authors, considered intelligent agents through the lens of interaction with reward-giving environments, attempting to assign numeric intelligence measures to such agents, with the guiding principle that a more intelligent agent should gain higher rewards from environments in some aggregate sense. In this paper, we consider a related question: rather than measure numeric intelligence of one Legg- Hutter agent, how can we compare the relative intelligence of two Legg-Hutter agents? We propose an elegant answer (...) based on the following insight: we can view Legg-Hutter agents as candidates in an election, whose voters are environments, letting each environment vote (via its rewards) which agent (if either) is more intelligent. This leads to an abstract family of comparators simple enough that we can prove some structural theorems about them. It is an open question whether these structural theorems apply to more practical intelligence measures. (shrink)

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

In the recent literatures in which moral understanding has played a starring role, it is assumed that moral understanding is a species of explanatory understanding. That is, it is assumed that instances of moral understanding are of the form ‘S understands why p,’ where p is some explicitly moral proposition, paradigmatically about an action being morally right or wrong. This paper highlights some shortcomings of this explanatory picture of moral understanding and articulates a different, complementary account on which the object (...) of moral understanding is the relation of normative support between a proposition and an action. (shrink)

In this article, I explicate Kant’s position on the wide right to abortion. That is, I explore the extent to which, according to Kant’s practical philosophy, abortion is punishable, even if it involves an unjust infringement of the right to life. By focusing on the state’s right to punish, rather than the right to life or the onset of personhood, I use Kant to expose a novel range of issues and questions about the legal status of abortion (and criminal punishment (...) more generally). The article is divided into four sections. In the first, I lay the groundwork for Kant’s theory of rights and briefly canvass some of the literature on Kantian approaches to abortion. In the second, I look at Kant’s discussion of equivocal rights. In the third, I turn to Kant’s discussions of capital punishment and suicide. In the fourth, I examine Kant on honor killings, and I use his position on infanticide in order to extrapolate and explain his ideas about the right to punish in the context of abortion. (shrink)

My goal in this piece is to show that there is a problem lurking in the shadows of recent attempts to derive positive duties from Kant’s so-called universalizability tests and, further, to show that the most obvious way of fixing these attempts renders them unable to fulfill their function. I shall begin by motivating and explaining such an attempt.

Dasgupta poses a serious challenge to realism about natural properties. He argues that there is no acceptable explanation of why natural properties deserve the value realists assign to them and are consequently absent of value. In response, this paper defines and defends an alternative non-explanatory account of normativity compatible with realism. Unlike Lewis and Sider, who believe it is sufficient to defend realism solely on realist terms, I engage with the challenge on unfriendly grounds by revealing a tu quoque. Dasgupta (...) and anti-realists face a similar challenge to that directed against realism: one that not only undermines the objection to realism by legitimising non-explanatory normativity but leaves them facing a significant dilemma. (shrink)

After generalizing the Archimedean property of real numbers in such a way as to make it adaptable to non-numeric structures, we demonstrate that the real numbers cannot be used to accurately measure non-Archimedean structures. We argue that, since an agent with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should have no problem engaging in tasks that inherently involve non-Archimedean rewards, and since traditional reinforcement learning rewards are real numbers, therefore traditional reinforcement learning probably will not lead to AGI. We indicate two possible ways (...) traditional reinforcement learning could be altered to remove this roadblock. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing (...) the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency. (shrink)

In Nicholas Smyth’s recent article, “When Does Self-Interest Distort Moral Belief,” he argues that self-interest undermines justification for moral belief if it justifies itself. In so doing, he opposes the standard account, which says that, to the extent that a person’s moral belief is explained by her egoistic or parochial interests, that belief is less justified. However, Smyth’s attack on the standard account, and the principle that he proposes to replace it with, do not withstand critical scrutiny, and that is (...) what this article is intended to show. To that end, the article is divided into three sections. In the first, I explain the standard account and provide some background. In the second, I critically examine Smyth’s three arguments against the standard account. In the third, I explain and attack Smyth’s own principle. I conclude that Smyth’s principle should not be accepted, and the standard account should not be rejected, at least on the basis of Smyth’s arguments: self-interest undermines justification in general, as per the standard account, not only when it justifies itself. (shrink)

Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way, we can provide principled explanations for the difference between (...) clinical and non-clinical cases of confabulation and the extent to which confabulation is rational. (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships (...) between shots. In this paper, we develop and defend a new version of the semantic view. We articulate it for a pair of conventions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule is already well-known; sometimes called the "180° Rule," we term it the X-Constraint; to this we add a previously unrecorded rule, the T-Constraint. As we show, both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the way that viewpoint can shift through space from shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Such constraints, we contend, are analogous to relations of discourse coherence that are widely recognized in the linguistic domain. If film is to have a language, it is a language made up of rules like these. (shrink)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental control, (...) people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)