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  1. Harnessing Moral Psychology to Reduce Meat Consumption.Joshua May & Victor Kumar - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (2):367-387.
    How can we make moral progress on factory farming? Part of the answer lies in human moral psychology. Meat consumption remains high, despite increased awareness of its negative impact on animal welfare. Weakness of will is part of the explanation: acceptance of the ethical arguments doesn’t always motivate changes in dietary habits. However, we draw on scientific evidence to argue that many consumers aren’t fully convinced that they morally ought to reduce their meat consumption. We then identify two key psychological (...)
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  2. How to Debunk Moral Beliefs.Victor Kumar & Joshua May - 2018 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 25-48.
    Arguments attempting to debunk moral beliefs, by showing they are unjustified, have tended to be global, targeting all moral beliefs or a large set of them. Popular debunking arguments point to various factors purportedly influencing moral beliefs, from evolutionary pressures, to automatic and emotionally-driven processes, to framing effects. We show that these sweeping arguments face a debunker’s dilemma: either the relevant factor is not a main basis for belief or it does not render the relevant beliefs unjustified. Empirical debunking arguments (...)
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  3. (1 other version)Moral Reasoning and Emotion.Joshua May & Victor Kumar - 2018 - In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 139-156.
    This chapter discusses contemporary scientific research on the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment. The literature suggests that moral judgment is influenced by both reasoning and emotion separately, but there is also emerging evidence of the interaction between the two. While there are clear implications for the rationalism-sentimentalism debate, we conclude that important questions remain open about how central emotion is to moral judgment. We also suggest ways in which moral philosophy is not only guided by empirical research (...)
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  4. Moral Reasoning and Moral Progress.Victor Kumar & Joshua May - forthcoming - In David Copp & Connie Rosati (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaethics. Oxford University Press.
    Can reasoning improve moral judgments and lead to moral progress? Pessimistic answers to this question are often based on caricatures of reasoning, weak scientific evidence, and flawed interpretations of solid evidence. In support of optimism, we discuss three forms of moral reasoning (principle reasoning, consistency reasoning, and social proof) that can spur progressive changes in attitudes and behavior on a variety of issues, such as charitable giving, gay rights, and meat consumption. We conclude that moral reasoning, particularly when embedded in (...)
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  5. A psychological account of the unique decline in anti-gay attitudes.Victor Kumar, Aditi Kodipady & Liane Young - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    1. Over the last 50 years or so, and especially over the last few decades, the U.S. and many other societies have undergone a large, rapid, and broad decline in anti-gay attitudes. The magnitude, s...
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  6. Precis of A Better Ape.Victor Kumar & Richmond Campbell - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (4):1-9.
    A Better Ape covers the evolution of morality from the birth of our ape family through the evolution of human species and all the way up to the development of modern societies. In this summary, we highlight several main elements of this account: the co-evolution of morality with intelligence and complex sociality; the role of social institutions and religious morality in the cultural evolution of behaviorally modern humans in prehistory; the increasing complexity of the moral mind through biological evolution in (...)
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