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20Sacrificing objects instead of persons: Order effects without emotional engagementPhilosophical Psychology. forthcoming.In this paper we develop test cases to adjudicate between dual-process and the causal mapping explanations of order effects. Using dilemmas with minimized emotional force, we explore new conditions for order effects to occur. Overall, the results support causal model theory. We produced novel evidence that order effects extend not only to cases with low emotional engagement, but also to specialized judgments about whether an action violates a rule. However, when objects are sacrificed instead of…Read more
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19Justice before Expediency: Robust Intuitive Concern for Rights Protection in Criminalization DecisionsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (1): 253-275. 2024.The notion that a false positive (false conviction) is worse than a false negative (false acquittal) is a deep-seated commitment in the theory of criminal law. Its most illustrious formulation, the so-called Blackstone’s ratio, affirms that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. Are people’s evaluations of criminal statutes consitent with this tenet of the Western legal tradition? To answer this question, we conducted three experiments (total _N_ = 2492) inv…Read more
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45Rethinking the Role of Experimental Philosophy in BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (12): 69-72. 2022.In their target article, titled “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today” (Blumenthal-Barby et al. 2022), Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby and colleagues provide a powerful argument for the role of phi...
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549The Typicality Effect in Basic NeedsSynthese 200 (5): 1-26. 2022.According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationaliz…Read more
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102Experimental Philosophical Bioethics of Personal IdentityIn Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self, Bloomsbury. pp. 183-202. 2022.The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought to understand the cognitive processes and eliciting factors that shape ordinary people’s judgments about personal identity and the self. Still more re…Read more
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397Experimental Philosophical Bioethics and Normative InferenceTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3-4): 91-111. 2021.This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situ…Read more
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585Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmasCognition and Emotion 36 (1): 137-153. 2022.At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for util…Read more
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402Purposes in law and in life: An experimental investigation of purpose attributionCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. forthcoming.There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both case…Read more
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58Advancing Methods in Empirical Bioethics: Bioxphi Meets Digital TechnologiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (6): 53-56. 2021.Historically, empirical research in bioethics has drawn on methods developed within the social sciences, including qualitative interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies, and opinion surveys, t...
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The dual nature of partisan prejudice: Morality and Identity in a multiparty sistemPLoS ONE 14 (e0219509). 2019.
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68How pills undermine skills: Moralization of cognitive enhancement and causal selectionConsciousness and Cognition 91 (C): 103120. 2021.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
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572Fuller and the Folk: The Inner Morality of Law RevisitedIn Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 6-28. 2020.The experimental turn in philosophy has reached several sub-fields including ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This paper is among the first to apply experimental techniques to questions in the philosophy of law. Specifically, we examine Lon Fuller's procedural natural law theory. Fuller famously claimed that legal systems necessarily observe eight principles he called "the inner morality of law." We evaluate Fuller's claim by surveying both ordinary people and legal experts about their int…Read more
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48A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalismJournal of Experimental Social Psychology 70 251-259. 2017.The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanati…Read more
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3825The Ship of Theseus PuzzleIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 158-174. 2014.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
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21Can Cosmopolitan Impartiality be NaturalizedPraxis 2 (1). 2009.This paper sets out asking what is to be gained from grounding the pursuit of a cosmopolitan morality in the evolutionary history of our morals, namely, by ascertaining some of the natural constraints under which normative ethical theory must operate. In Section II, I review two major forms of altruism: kin-based and reciprocal altruism. Experimental evidence is cited to support the view that biological altruism involves a carefully self-interested calculation to enhance adaptive fitness to the …Read more
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6Questioning the causal inheritance principleTheoria 25 (3): 261-277. 2010.Mental causation, though a forceful intuition embedded in our commonsense psychology, is difficult to square with the rest of commitments of physicalism about the mind. Advocates of mental causation have found solace in the causal inheritance principle, according to which the mental properties of mental states share the causal powers of their physical counterparts. In this paper, I present a variety of counterarguments to causal inheritance and conclude that the requirements for causal inheritan…Read more
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82Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: 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
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47Act Versus Impact: Conservatives and Liberals Exhibit Different Structural Emphases in Moral JudgmentRatio 30 (4): 462-493. 2017.Conservatives and liberals disagree sharply on matters of morality and public policy. We propose a novel account of the psychological basis of these differences. Specifically, we find that conservatives tend to emphasize the intrinsic value of actions during moral judgment, in part by mentally simulating themselves performing those actions, while liberals instead emphasize the value of the expected outcomes of the action. We then demonstrate that a structural emphasis on actions is linked to the…Read more
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136Might-counterfactuals and the principle of conditional excluded middleDisputatio 4 (30): 127-149. 2011.Owing to the problem of inescapable clashes, epistemic accounts of might-counterfactuals have recently gained traction. In a different vein, the might argument against conditional excluded middle has rendered the latter a contentious principle to incorporate into a logic for conditionals. The aim of this paper is to rescue both ontic mightcounterfactuals and conditional excluded middle from these disparate debates and show them to be compatible. I argue that the antecedent of a might-counte…Read more
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13Diet-ética: ¿consumo local o comercio justo?Isegoría 41 277-285. 2009.En su libro The Way We Eat, Peter Singer pretende concienciarnos sobre la ética del comer y los gastos ocultos, para el medioambiente y para los más pobres, de la dieta típica del primer mundo. A partir del análisis crítico de la industria alimentaria, presenta tres propuestas para el lector concienciado: el consumo local, el comercio justo y el vegetarianismo. A pesar de los beneficios ecológicos del consumo local, otras vías para proteger el medioambiente que no impiden el desarrollo económico…Read more
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49Intencionalidad sin naturalismo biológicoRevista de Filosofía (Madrid) 36 (1): 139-153. 2011.The Chinese Room argument is a variant of Turing’s test which enables Searle to defend his biological naturalism, according to which computation is neither sufficient nor constitutive of the mind. In this paper, I examine both strands of his anticomputationalist stance, argue that computation is constitutive of natural language understanding and suggest a path toward the physicalist reduction of intentionality for propositional speech acts
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |