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1215Unifying morality’s influence on non-moral judgments: The relevance of alternative possibilitiesCognition 145 (C): 30-42. 2015.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 …Read more
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433Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1): 47-67. 2006.Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a non-zero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsd…Read more
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1381Normative Judgments and Individual EssenceCognitive Science 41 (S3): 382-402. 2017.A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs do a…Read more
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116What is experimental philosophy?The Philosophers' Magazine 28 37-39. 2004.Since the earliest days of analytic philosophy, it has been a common practice to appeal to intuitions about particular cases. Typically, the philosopher presents a hypothetical situation and then makes a claim of the form: ‘In this case, we would surely say....’ This claim about people’s intuitions then forms a part of an argument for some more general theory about the nature of our concepts or our use of language. One puzzling aspect of this practice is that it so rarely makes use of standard e…Read more
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3Can one act for a reason without acting intentionally?In Constantine Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 169--183. 2009.
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |