-
19Bioethical Ideals, Actual Practice, and the Double Life of NormsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (4): 86-88. 2020.Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 86-88.
-
662Enhancement, Authenticity, and Social Acceptance in the Age of IndividualismAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 10 (1): 51-53. 2019.Public attitudes concerning cognitive enhancements are significant for a number of reasons. They tell us about how socially acceptable these emerging technologies are considered to be, but they also provide a window into the ethical reasons that are likely to get traction in the ongoing debates about them. We thus see Conrad et al’s project of empirically investigating the effect of metaphors and context in shaping attitudes about cognitive enhancements as both interesting and important. We sket…Read more
-
241Getting Rid of Racism: Assessing Three Proposals in Light of Psychological EvidenceJournal of Social Philosophy 41 (3): 293-322. 2010.At the end of a chapter in his book Race, Racism and Reparations, Angelo Corlett notes that “[t]here remain other queries about racism [than those he addressed in his chapter], which need philosophical exploration. … Perhaps most important, how might racism be unlearned?” (2003, 93). We agree with Corlett’s assessment of its importance, but find that philosophers have not been very keen to directly engage with the issue of how to best deal with, and ultimately do away with, racism. Rather, they …Read more
-
286Selective debunking arguments, folk psychology, and empirical psychologyIn Hagop Sarkissian & Jennifer Cole Wright (eds.), Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 130-147. 2014.Rather than set out an overarching view or take a stand on the debunking of morality tout court, in what follows I’ll explore a divide and conquer strategy. First, I will briefly sketch a debunking argument that, instead of targeting all of morality or human moral nature, has a more narrow focus—namely, the intuitive moral authority of disgust. The argument concludes that as vivid and compelling as they can be while one is in their grip, feelings of disgust should be granted no power to justify …Read more
-
1884Social norms and human normative psychologySocial Philosophy and Policy 35 (1): 54-76. 2018.Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch a cognitive evolutionary approach for developing explanations of social change that is anchored on the psychological mechanisms underlying normative cognition and the transmission of social norms. We throw the relevant features of this approach into relief by comparing it with the self-fulfilling social expectations account developed by Bicchieri and colleagues. After describing both accounts, we argue that the two approaches are largely compatible, but…Read more
-
971Minding the Gap: Bias, Soft Structures, and the Double Life of Social NormsJournal of Applied Philosophy (2): 190-210. 2018.We argue that work on norms provides a way to move beyond debates between proponents of individualist and structuralist approaches to bias, oppression, and injustice. We briefly map out the geography of that debate before presenting Charlotte Witt’s view, showing how her position, and the normative ascriptivism at its heart, seamlessly connects individuals to the social reality they inhabit. We then describe recent empirical work on the psychology of norms and locate the notions of informal inst…Read more
-
508Implicit Bias, Character and ControlIn Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 106-133. 2016.Our focus here is on whether, when influenced by implicit biases, those behavioural dispositions should be understood as being a part of that person’s character: whether they are part of the agent that can be morally evaluated.[4] We frame this issue in terms of control. If a state, process, or behaviour is not something that the agent can, in the relevant sense, control, then it is not something that counts as part of her character. A number of theorists have argued that individuals do not hav…Read more
-
555Making race out of nothing : psychologically constrained social rolesIn Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford University Press. 2012.Race is one of the most common variables in the social sciences, used to draw correlations between racial groups and numerous other important variables such as education, healthcare outcomes, aptitude tests, wealth, employment and so forth. But where concern with race once reflected the view that races were biologically real, many, if not most, contemporary social scientists have abandoned the idea that racial categories demarcate substantial, intrinsic biological differences between people. Thi…Read more
-
2105Who’s Responsible for This? Moral Responsibility, Externalism, and Knowledge about Implicit BiasIn Michael Brownstein & Jennifer Saul (eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.In this paper we aim to think systematically about, formulate, and begin addressing some of the challenges to applying theories of moral responsibility to behaviors shaped by a particular subset of unsettling psychological complexities: namely, implicit biases.
-
50Norms, not moral norms: The boundaries of morality do not matterBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
-
45This dissertation explores issues in the philosophy of psychology and metaphysics through the lens of the emotion of disgust, and its corresponding property, disgustingness. The first chapter organizes an extremely large body of data about disgust, imposes two constraints any theory must meet, and offers a cognitive model of the mechanisms underlying the emotion. The second chapter explores the evolution of disgust, and argues for the Entanglement thesis: this uniquely human emotion was formed w…Read more
-
50The role of psychology in the study of cultureBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 355-355. 2006.Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena. (Published Online November 9 2006).
-
86Moral realism and cross-cultural normative diversityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (6): 830-830. 2005.We discuss the implications of the findings reported in the target article for moral theory, and argue that they represent a clear and genuine case of fundamental moral disagreement. As such, the findings support a moderate form of moral anti-realism – the position that, for some moral issues, there is no fact of the matter about what is right and wrong
-
57On the Morality of Harm: A response to Sousa, Holbrook and PiazzaCognition 113 (1): 93-97. 2009.
-
92Moral Disgust and The Tribal Instincts HypothesisIn Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott & Ben Fraser (eds.), Cooperation and its Evolution, Mit Press. 2013.Psychological research has been discovering a number of puzzling features of morality and moral cognition recently.2 Zhong & Liljenquist (2006) found that when people are asked to think about an unethical deed or recall one they themselves have committed in the past, issues of physical cleanliness become salient. Zhong & Liljenquist cleverly designate this phenomenon the “Macbeth Effect,” and it takes some interesting forms. For instance, reading a story describing an immoral deed increased peop…Read more
-
92Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of DisgustBradford. 2011.People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract -- by an object they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different things will disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In _Yuck!_, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives. Disgust has recently been riding a sw…Read more
-
68A tale of two processes: On Joseph Henrich’s the secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarterPhilosophical Psychology 30 (6): 832-848. 2017.We situate Henrich’s book in the larger research tradition of which it is a part and show how he presents a wide array of recent psychological, physiological, and neurological data as supporting the view that two related but distinct processes have shaped human nature and made us unique: cumulative cultural evolution and culture-driven genetic evolution. We briefly sketch out several ways philosophers might fruitfully engage with this view and note some implications it may have for current philo…Read more
-
459Racial cognition and the ethics of implicit biasPhilosophy Compass 3 (3). 2008.We first describe recent empirical research on racial cognition, particularly work on implicit racial biases that suggests they are widespread, that they can coexist with explicitly avowed anti-racist and tolerant attitudes, and that they influence behavior in a variety of subtle but troubling ways. We then consider a cluster of questions that the existence and character of implicit racial biases raise for moral theory. First, is it morally condemnable to harbor an implicit racial bias? Second, …Read more
-
763Nudging and the Ecological and Social Roots of Human AgencyAmerican Journal of Bioethics 16 (11): 15-17. 2016.
-
139Against the Yuck Factor: On the Ideal Role of Disgust in SocietyUtilitas 26 (2): 153-177. 2014.The view we defend is that in virtue of its nature, disgust is not fit to do any moral or social work whatsoever, and that there are no defensible uses for disgust in legal or political institutions. We first describe our favoured empirical theory of the nature of disgust. Turning from descriptive to normative issues, we address the best arguments in favour of granting disgust the power to justify certain judgements, and to serve as a social tool, respectively. Daniel Kahan advances a pair of th…Read more
-
241I argue that the recent debate about the role disgust deserves in ethical thought has been impoverished by an inadequate understanding of the emotion itself. After considering Kass and Nussbaum’s respective positions in that debate, and the implausible views of the nature of disgust on which their arguments rest, I describe my own view, which makes sense of the wealth of recent, often puzzling, empirical work done on the emotion. This view sees disgust as being primarily responsible for protecti…Read more
-
212Moral judgmentIn Sarah Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Routledge. 2009.Questions regarding the nature of moral judgment loom large in moral philosophy. Perhaps the most basic of these questions asks how, exactly, moral judgments and moral rules are to be defined; what features distinguish them from other sorts of rules and judgments? A related question concerns the extent to which emotion and reason guide moral judgment. Are moral judgments made mainly on the basis of reason, or are they primarily the products of emotion? As an example of the former view, Kant held…Read more
-
885I Eat, Therefore I Am: Disgust and the Intersection of Food and IdentityIn Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2017.
-
60The role of psychology in the study of cultureBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 355-355. 2006.Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena
-
224Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinctionMind and Language 22 (2). 2007.The moral/conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the deficits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous studies have indicated that moral transgressions, particularly those in which a victim is harmed, evoke a signature pattern of responses in the moral/conventional task: they are judged to be serious, generalizable and not authority dependent. Moreover, this signature pattern is held to be pan‐cultural and t…Read more
West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Value Theory, Misc |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Value Theory, Misc |