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310Causal judgment and moral judgment: Two experimentsIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Mit Press. 2008.It has long been known that people’s causal judgments can have an impact on their moral judgments. To take a simple example, if people conclude that a behavior caused the death of ten innocent children, they will therefore be inclined to regard the behavior itself as morally wrong. So far, none of this should come as any surprise. But recent experimental work points to the existence of a second, and more surprising, aspect of the relationship between causal judgment and moral judgment. It appear…Read more
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746The Pervasive Impact of Moral JudgmentMind and Language 24 (5): 586-604. 2009.Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.
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1504Do theories of implicit race bias change moral judgments?Social Justice Research 23 272-289. 2010.Recent work in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact su…Read more
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438Self and other in the explanation of behavior: 30 years laterPsychologica Belgica 42 113-130. 2002.It has been hypothesized that actors tend to attribute behavior to the situation whereas observers tend to attribute behavior to the person (Jones & Nisbett 1972). The authors argue that this simple hypothesis fails to capture the complexity of actual actor-observer differences in people’s behavioral explanations. A new framework is proposed in which reason explanations are distinguished from explanations that cite causes, especially stable traits. With this framework in place, it becomes possib…Read more
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342Finding the Mind in the BodyIn Max Brockman (ed.), Future Science: Essays from the Cutting Edge, Random House. pp. 184-196. 2011.
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Moral cognition and theory of mind: Exploring the connectionsTrends in Cognitive Sciences 9 357-359. 2005.
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146Folk psychology: Science and moralsIn Daniel Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, Kluwer/springer Press. pp. 157--173. 2007.It is widely agreed that folk psychology plays an important role in people’s moral judgments. For a simple example, take the process by which we determine whether or not an agent is morally blameworthy. Although the judgment here is ultimately a moral one, it seems that one needs to use a fair amount of folk psychology along the way. Thus, one might determine that an agent broke the vase intentionally and therefore conclude that she is blameworthy for breaking it. Here it seems that one starts o…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |