•  586
    Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behavior. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to avoid the spread of the virus include costly behaviors such as self-quarantining or drastically diminishing social contacts. Compliance (or lack thereof) with these recommendations is a controversial and divisive topic, and lay hypotheses abound regarding what underlies this divide. This paper investigates which cognitive, moral, and emotional tr…Read more
  •  39
    Despite the promise to boost human potential and wellbeing, enhancement drugs face recurring ethical scrutiny. The present studies examined attitudes toward cognitive enhancement in order to learn more about these ethical concerns, who has them, and the circumstances in which they arise. Fairness-based concerns underlay opposition to competitive use—even though enhancement drugs were described as legal, accessible and affordable. Moral values also influenced how subsequent rewards were causally …Read more
  •  62
    Lost in Intensity: Is there an empirical solution to the quasi-emotions debate?
    with Steve Humbert-Droz, Amanda Ludmilla Garcia, Vanessa Sennwald, Fabrice Teroni, Julien Deonna, and David Sander
    Aesthetic Investigations 4 (1): 460-482. 2020.
    Contrary to the emotions we feel in everyday contexts, the emotions we feel for fictional characters do not seem to require a belief in the existence of their object. This observation has given birth to a famous philosophical paradox (the ‘paradox of fiction’), and has led some philosophers to claim that the emotions we feel for fictional characters are not genuine emotions but rather “quasi-emotions”. Since then, the existence of quasi-emotions has been a hotly debated issue. Recently, philosop…Read more
  •  270
    De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment
    with Christopher Y. Olivola, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, David Rose, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles E. Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro V. del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang, and Jing Zhu
    Mind and Language 34 (3): 317-338. 2019.
    Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment.…Read more
  •  148
    For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures
    with Ivar R. Hannikainen, Edouard Machery, David Rose, Stephen Stich, Christopher Y. Olivola, Paulo Sousa, Emma E. Buchtel, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniûnas, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas López, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang, and Jing Zhu
    Frontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.
    Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and…Read more
  •  300
    Equality Beyond Needs‐Satisfaction: An Empirical Investigation
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (2): 273-298. 2019.
    abstract The moral value of distributive equality constitutes one of the most contentious debates in political philosophy. Following Frankfurt, many philosophers have claimed that the intuitive appeal of equality is illusory and that egalitarian intuitions are fundamentally intuitions about the importance of satisfying basic needs. According to this argument, our intuitions tell us that inequality ceases to matter once a certain threshold has been reached. Despite the widespread appeal to intuit…Read more
  •  62
    Being moved
    Philosophical Studies 169 (3): 447-466. 2014.
    In this paper, we argue that, barring a few important exceptions, the phenomenon we refer to using the expression “being moved” is a distinct type of emotion. In this paper’s first section, we motivate this hypothesis by reflecting on our linguistic use of this expression. In section two, pursuing a methodology that is both conceptual and empirical, we try to show that the phenomenon satisfies the five most commonly used criteria in philosophy and psychology for thinking that some affective epis…Read more
  •  17
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics (edited book)
    with Sébastien Réhault
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
    Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But there has been very little experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophical aesthetics. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics introduces this burgeoning research field, presenting it both in its unity and diversity, and determining the nature and methods of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Addressing a wide…Read more
  •  3447
    The Ship of Theseus Puzzle
    with David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Vilius Dranseika, Angeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Min-Woo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Alejandro Rosas, Carlos Romero, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez Del Vázquez Del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang, and Jing Zhu
    In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 158-174. 2020.
    Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-t…Read more
  •  27
    Being moved by meaningfulness: appraisals of surpassing internal standards elicit being moved by relationships and achievements
    with Helen Landmann and Ursula Hess
    Cognition and Emotion 33 (7): 1387-1409. 2019.
    ABSTRACTPeople can be moved and overwhelmed, a phenomenon typically accompanied by goose-bumps and tears. We argue that these feelings of being moved are not limited to situations that are appraise...
  •  16
    In this paper, I question the dichotomy between fundamental moral disagreements, arising from divergences on moral principles, and superficial moral disagreements, that are expected to disappear under ideal epistemic circumstances. I claim that there are many other possibilities for moral disagreements, including moral disagreements that do not arise from different moral principles but would not disappear under ideal epistemic conditions. I describe two major kinds of such disagreements: semi-fu…Read more
  •  45
    What Happened to the Trolley Problem?
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 543-564. 2017.
    In this paper, I provide a general introduction to the trolley problem. I describe its birth as a philosophical thought experiment, then its successful career in moral psychology. I explain the different reasons behind its popularity and success but argue that, despite its popularity and widespread utilization in psychological research, few researchers have actually tried to directly solve it and that we are still ignorant of the real factors guiding our responses to trolley cases. Against the i…Read more
  •  32
    Free love? On the relation between belief in free will, determinism, and passionate love
    with Jordane Boudesseul, Anthony Lantian, Florian Cova, and Laurent Bègue
    Consciousness and Cognition 46 47-59. 2016.
  •  78
    Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-Mentalizing
    with David Rose, Machery Edouard, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Angelucci Adriano, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In‐Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Vilius Dranseika, Eraña Lagos Ángeles, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Kim Hackjin, Kim Yeonjeong, Lee Minwoo, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Moruzzi Sebastiano, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas, Sangoi Massimo, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, del Mercado Alejandro Vázquez, Giorgio Volpe, A. Vosgerichian Hrag, Xueyi Zhang, and Jing Zhu
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.
    Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregard…Read more
  •  58
    Frankfurt-style cases are supposed to constitute counter-examples to the principle of alternate possibilities, for they are cases in which we have the intuition that an agent is morally responsible for his action, even though he could not have done otherwise. In a recent paper, Swenson rejects this conclusion, on the basis of a comparison between standard FSCs, which typically feature actions, and similar cases involving omissions. Because the absence of alternate possibilities seems to preclude…Read more
  •  805
    Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first ta…Read more
  •  13
    À quoi les philosophes sont-ils bons ? Faire de la philosophie rend-il meilleur ? Les jugements esthétiques gardent-ils encore quelque secret, ou bien Kant a-t-il tout dit sur la question ? La culture et le statut socio-économique de votre professeur de philosophie a-t-il une influence sur ses options philosophiques ? Pourquoi avons-nous l'impression que la pensée ne saurait être un état de notre cerveau ? Que nous ne serions pas libres si nous n'étions qu'un tas de neurone ? C'est pour répondre…Read more
  •  460
    The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis an…Read more
  •  906
    ‘Frankfurt-style cases’ (FSCs) are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy (J Philos 105:223–239, 2008) has recently argued that FSCs fail because we are not entitled to suppose that the agent is morally responsible, given that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough to make an agent lose responsibility-grounding a…Read more
  •  1422
    Experimental Philosophy and the Compatibility of Free Will and Determinism: A Survey
    Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 22 17-37. 2014.
    The debate over whether free will and determinism are compatible is controversial, and produces wide scholarly discussion. This paper argues that recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that people are in fact “natural compatibilists”. To support this claim, it surveys the experimental literature bearing directly or indirectly upon this issue, before pointing to three possible limitations of this claim. However, notwithstanding these limitations, the investigation concludes that the ex…Read more
  •  1072
    Studying the folk concept of intentional action, Knobe (2003a) discovered a puzzling asymmetry: most people consider some bad side effects as intentional while they consider some good side effects as unintentional. In this study, we extend these findings with new experiments. The first experiment shows that the very same effect can be found in ascriptions of intentionality in the case of means for action. The second and third experiments show that means are nevertheless generally judged more int…Read more
  •  73
    The emotional shape of our moral life: Anger-related emotions and mutualistic anthropology
    with Julien Deonna and David Sander
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1). 2013.
    The evolutionary hypothesis advanced by Baumard et al. makes precise predictions on which emotions should play the main role in our moral lives: morality should be more closely linked to emotions (like contempt and disgust) than to emotions (like anger). Here, we argue that these predictions run contrary to most psychological evidence
  •  15
    An Assessment of Scaife and Webber’s ‘Consideration Hypothesis’
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (1): 57-79. 2014.
    The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis an…Read more
  •  667
    Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgements about intentional action, Knobe [. “Intentional Action and Side-Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] has claimed that these judgements are shaped by our moral judgements and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action – the “frame-of-mind condition”, according to which judgements about intentional action are about the agent’s frame-of-mind and not about the moral value of …Read more
  •  1301
    Introduction: Moral Emotions
    with Julien Deonna and David Sander
    Topoi 34 (2): 397-400. 2015.
  •  1693
    This paper provides a comprehensive review of the experimental philosophy of action, focusing on the various different accounts of the Knobe Effect.
  •  701
    Being moved
    Philosophical Studies (3): 1-20. 2014.
    In this paper, we argue that, barring a few important exceptions, the phenomenon we refer to using the expression “being moved” is a distinct type of emotion. In this paper’s first section, we motivate this hypothesis by reflecting on our linguistic use of this expression. In section two, pursuing a methodology that is both conceptual and empirical, we try to show that the phenomenon satisfies the five most commonly used criteria in philosophy and psychology for thinking that some affective epis…Read more
  •  130
    Moral asymmetries and the semantics of many
    with Paul Egré
    Semantics and Pragmatics 8 (13): 1-45. 2015.
    We present the results of four experiments concerning the evaluation people make of sentences involving “many”, showing that two sentences of the form “many As are Bs” vs. “many As are Cs” need not be equivalent when evaluated relative to a background in which B and C have the same cardinality and proportion to A, but in which B and C are predicates with opposite semantic and affective values. The data provide evidence that subjects lower the standard relevant to ascribe “many” for the more nega…Read more
  •  30
    Can Folk Aesthetics Ground Aesthetic Realism?
    The Monist 95 (2): 241-263. 2012.
    We challenge an argument that aims to support Aesthetic Realism by claiming, first, that common sense is realist about aesthetic judgments because it considers that aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong, and, second, that becauseAesthetic Realism comes from and accounts for “folk aesthetics,” it is the best aesthetic theory available.We empirically evaluate this argument by probing whether ordinary people with no training whatsoever in the subtle debates of aesthetic philosophy consider thei…Read more