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138Stereotype threat and intellectual virtueIn Owen Flanagan & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Naturalizing Virtue, Cambridge University Press. pp. 155-74. 2014.For decades, intelligence and achievement tests have registered significant differences between people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and genders. We argue that most of these differences are explained not as reflections of differences in the distribution of intellectual virtues but as evidence for the metacognitive mediation of the intellectual virtues. For example, in the United States, blacks typically score worse than whites on tests of mathematics. This might lead one to think t…Read more
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71Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Personal Value (review)Social Theory and Practice 39 (1): 166-170. 2013.In her critique of Moore’s (1903, p. 55) suggestion that one might answer the question “What is good?” with “Books are good,” Judith Jarvis Thomson (1997, p. 276) asks what it could mean to say that books are “just plain” good or bad. Aren’t they rather good to read, or in teaching philosophy, or for weighing down papers? This point is apropos in a review of Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen’s Personal Value in two ways. One might worry, first, about his facile dismissal (p. 7) of the notion that such fi…Read more
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713Epistemic situationism: An Extended ProlepsisIn Mark Alfano & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Epistemic Situationism, Oxford University Press. 2017.This paper is an extended prolepsis in favor of epistemic situationism, the thesis that epistemic virtues are not sufficiently widely distributed for a virtue-theoretic constraint on knowledge to apply without leading to skepticism. It deals with four objections to epistemic situation: 1) that virtuous dispositions are not required for knowledge, 2) that the Big Five or Big Six personality model proves that intellectual virtues are a reasonable ideal, 3) that the cognitive-affective personality …Read more
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1364Nietzsche, naturalism, and the tenacity of the intentionalJournal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (3): 457-464. 2013.In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche demands that “psychology shall be<br>recognized again as the queen of the sciences.” While one might cast a dubious glance at the “again,” many of Nietzsche’s insights were indeed psychological, and many of his arguments invoke psychological premises. In Genealogy, he criticizes the “English psychologists” for the “inherent psychological absurdity” of their theory of the origin of good and bad, pointing out the implausibility of the claim that the utility of un…Read more
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107Experimental Moral PhilosophyIn Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology inthe last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the largerexperimental philosophy approach. From the beginning,it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Somedoubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it isphilosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best andconfusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance., Before the research program can be evaluated,…Read more
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2136Experimental moral philosophyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1-32. 2018.Experimental moral philosophy emerged as a methodology in the last decade of the twentieth century, as a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi) approach. Experimental moral philosophy is the empirical study of moral intuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Like other forms of experimental philosophy, it involves gathering data using experimental methods and using these data to substantiate, undermine, or revise philosophical theories. In this case, the theories in question concern the…Read more
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341A danger of definition: Polar predicates in moral theoryJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (3): 1-14. 2009.In this paper, I use an example from the history of philosophy to show how independently defining each side of a pair of contrary predicates is apt to lead to contradiction. In the Euthyphro, piety is defined as that which is loved by some of the gods while impiety is defined as that which is hated by some of the gods. Socrates points out that since the gods harbor contrary sentiments, some things are both pious and impious. But “pious” and “impious” are contrary predicates; they cannot simultan…Read more
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21Visualizing ValuesIn David Rheams, Tai Neilson & Lewis Levenberg (eds.), Handbook of Methods in the Digital Humanities, Rowman & Littlefield. forthcoming.Digital humanities research has developed haphazardly, with substantive contributions in some disciplines and only superficial uses in others. It has made almost no inroads in philosophy; for example, of the nearly two million articles, chapters, and books housed at philpapers.org, only sixteen pop up when one searches for ‘digital humanities’. In order to make progress in this field, we demonstrate that a hypothesis-driven method, applied by experts in data-collection, -aggregation, -analysis, …Read more
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162Reversing the side-effect effect: the power of salient normsPhilosophical Studies 172 (1): 177-206. 2015.In the last decade, experimental philosophers have documented systematic asymmetries in the attributions of mental attitudes to agents who produce different types of side effects. We argue that this effect is driven not simply by the violation of a norm, but by salient-norm violation. As evidence for this hypothesis, we present two new studies in which two conflicting norms are present, and one or both of them is raised to salience. Expanding one’s view to these additional cases presents, we arg…Read more
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1724Placebo Effects and Informed ConsentAmerican Journal of Bioethics 15 (10): 3-12. 2015.The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the pro…Read more
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40Simon May , Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide , 345 pages. ISBN: 9780521518802 . Hardback: $99.00 (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (5): 692-694. 2013.
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662How one becomes what one is: The case for a Nietzschean conception of character developmentIn Iskra Fileva (ed.), Questions of Character, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.Gone are the heady days when Bernard Williams (1993) could get away with saying that “Nietzsche is not a source of philosophical theories” (p. 4). The last two decades have witnessed a flowering of research that aims to interpret, elucidate, and defend Nietzsche’s theories about science, the mind, and morality. This paper is one more blossom in that efflorescence. What I want to argue is that Nietzsche theorized three important and surprising moral psychological insights that have been born o…Read more
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44Identifying and Defending the Hard Core of Virtue EthicsJournal of Philosophical Research 38 233-260. 2013.Virtue ethics has been challenged on empirical grounds by philosophical interpreters of situationist social psychology. Challenges are necessarily challenges to something or other, so it’s only possible to understand the situationist challenge to virtue ethics if we have an antecedent grasp on virtue ethics itself. To this end, I first identify the non-negotiable “hard core” of virtue ethics with the conjunction of nine claims, arguing that virtue ethics does make substantive empirical assumptio…Read more
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50Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, & Matthias Uhl , Experimental Ethics: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy: New York: Palgrave, 2014. ISBN 9781137409799, $100, HbkEthical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1): 185-188. 2017.
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394Becoming less unreasonable: A reply to ShermanSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4 (7): 59-62. 2015.
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815The Semantic Neighborhood of Intellectual HumilityProceedings of the European Conference on Social Intelligence. 2014.Intellectual humility is an interesting but underexplored disposition. The claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker expresses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility…Read more
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922Trust and distrust in institutions and governanceIn Judith Simon (ed.), Handbook of Trust and Philosophy, Routledge. forthcoming.First, we explain the conception of trustworthiness that we employ. We model trustworthiness as a relation among a trustor, a trustee, and a field of trust defined and delimited by its scope. In addition, both potential trustors and potential trustees are modeled as being more or less reliable in signaling either their willingness to trust or their willingness to prove trustworthy in various fields in relation to various other agents. Second, following Alfano (forthcoming) we argue that the soci…Read more
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2120The Tenacity of the Intentional Prior to the GenealogyJournal of Nietzsche Studies 40 (1): 29-46. 2010.I have argued elsewhere that the psychological aspects of Nietzsche’s later works are best understood from a psychodynamic point of view. Nietzsche holds a view I dubbed the tenacity of the intentional (T): when an intentional state loses its object, a new object replaces the original; the state does not disappear entirely. In this essay I amend and clarify (T) to (T``): When an intentional state with a sub-propositional object loses its object, the affective component of the state persists wi…Read more
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554Mapping Human Values: Enhancing Social Marketing through Obituary Data-MiningIn Eda Gurel-Atay & Lynn Kahle (eds.), Social and Cultural Values in a Global and Digital Age, Routledge. forthcoming.Obituaries are an especially rich resource for identifying people’s values. Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author(s) find most salient, not only for themselves as relatives or friends of the deceased, but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We report three approaches to the scientific study of virtue and value t…Read more
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990Nietzsche's Moral PsychologyCambridge University Press. 2019.Introduction 1 Précis 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art …Read more
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221Epistemic Situationism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.Table of Contents Introduction: Epistemic Situationism by Abrol Fairweather 1. Is Every Epistemology A Virtue Epistemology? by Lauren Olin 2. Epistemic Situationism: An extended prolepsis by Mark Alfano 3. Virtue Epistemology in the Zombie Apocalypse: Hungry Judges, Heavy Clipboards and Grou Polarization by Berit Brogaard 4. Situationism and Responsibilist Virtue Epistemology by James Montmarquet 5. Virtue Theory Against Situationism by Ernest Sosa 6. Intellectual Virtue Now and Again by Chr…Read more
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4189Friendship and the Structure of TrustIn Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 186-206. 2016.In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral virtues are exactly like friendship…Read more
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123BraggingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (4): 263-272. 2014.The speech act of bragging has never been subjected to conceptual analysis until now. We argue that a speaker brags just in case she makes an utterance that is an assertion and is intended to impress the addressee with something about the speaker via the belief produced by the speaker's assertion. We conclude by discussing why it is especially difficult to cancel a brag by prefacing it with, ‘I'm not trying to impress you, but…’ and connect this discussion with Moore's paradox and the recent neo…Read more
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744An Enchanting Abundance of Types: Nietzsche’s Modest Unity of Virtue ThesisJournal of Value Inquiry 49 (3): 417-435. 2015.Although Nietzsche accepted a distant cousin of Brian Leiter’s “Doctrine of Types,” according to which, “Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person,” the details of his actual view are quite different from the flat-footed position Leiter attributes to him. Leiter argues that Nietzsche thought that type-facts partially explain the beliefs and actions, including moral beliefs and actions, of the person whom those type-facts characterize.…Read more
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114What are the bearers of virtues?In Hagop Sarkissian & Jennifer Cole Wright (eds.), Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 73-90. 2014.It’s natural to assume that the bearers of virtues are individual agents, which would make virtues monadic dispositional properties. I argue instead that the most attractive theory of virtue treats a virtue as a triadic relation among the agent, the social milieu, and the asocial environment. A given person may or may not be disposed to behave in virtuous ways depending on how her social milieu speaks to and of her, what they expect of her, and how they monitor her. Likewise, asocial environm…Read more
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1115Virtue and Vice Attributions in the Business Context: An Experimental InvestigationJournal of Business Ethics 113 (4): 649-661. 2013.Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for bu…Read more
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1783Ramsifying Virtue TheoryIn Current Controversies in Virtue Theory, Routledge. pp. 123-35. 2015.In his contribution, Mark Alfano lays out a new (to virtue theory) naturalistic way of determining what the virtues are, what it would take for them to be realized, and what it would take for them to be at least possible. This method is derived in large part from David Lewis’s development of Frank Ramsey’s method of implicit definition. The basic idea is to define a set of terms not individually but in tandem. This is accomplished by assembling all and only the common sense platitudes that invol…Read more
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98The Centrality of Belief and Reflection in Knobe-Effect CasesThe Monist 95 (2): 264-289. 2012.Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the belief that one’s action would result in a certain side effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in …Read more
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894I Know You Are, But What Am I?: Anti-Individualism in the Development of Intellectual Humility and Wu-WeiLogos and Episteme 7 (4): 435-459. 2016.Virtues are acquirable, so if intellectual humility is a virtue, it’s acquirable. But there is something deeply problematic—perhaps even paradoxical—about aiming to be intellectually humble. Drawing on Edward Slingerland’s analysis of the paradoxical virtue of wu-wei in Trying Not To Try (New York: Crown, 2014), we argue for an anti-individualistic conception of the trait, concluding that one’s intellectual humility depends upon the intellectual humility of others. Slingerland defines wu-wei as …Read more
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96Liao, S. Matthew , Moral Brains: the Neuroscience of Morality: New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Paperback € 22,13, pp. 384Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3): 671-674. 2017.Matthew Liao is to be commended for editing Moral Brains, a fine collection showcasing truly 12 excellent chapters by, among others, James Woodward, Molly Crocket, and Jana Schaich 13 Borg. In addition to Liao’s detailed, fair-minded, and comprehensive introduction, the book 14 has fourteen chapters. Of these, one is a reprint (Joshua Greene ch. 4), one a re-articulation of 15 previously published arguments (Walter Sinnott-Armstrong ch. 14), and one a literature review 16 (Oliveira-Souza, Zahn, …Read more
CUNY
Alumnus, 2011
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language, Miscellaneous |
PhilPapers Editorships
Skepticism about Character |