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444Humility in networksIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. 2021.What do humility, intellectual humility, and open-mindedness mean in the context of inter-group conflict? We spend most of our time with ingroup members, such as family, friends, and colleagues. Yet our biggest disagreements —— about practical, moral, and epistemic matters —— are likely to be with those who do not belong to our ingroup. An attitude of humility towards the former might be difficult to integrate with a corresponding attitude of humility towards the latter, leading to smug tribalis…Read more
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440Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, & Matthias Uhl , Experimental Ethics: Toward an Empirical Moral PhilosophyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 1-4. 2016.It would be unkind but not inaccurate to say that most experimental philosophy is just psychology with worse methods and better theories. In Experimental Ethics: Towards an Empirical Moral Philosophy, Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, and Matthias Uhl set out to make this comparison less invidious and more flattering. Their book has 16 chapters, organized into five sections and bookended by the editors’ own introduction and prospectus. Contributors hail from four countries (Germany, USA, Spain, an…Read more
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427The Nietzschean precedent for anti-reflective, dialogical agencyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.John Doris and Friedrich Nietzsche have a lot in common. In addition to being provocative and humorous writers in their native idioms, they share a conception of human agency. It can be tiresome to point out the priority claims of an earlier philosopher, so I should say at the outset that I do so not to smugly insist that my guy got there first but to showcase a closely-allied perspective that may shed additional light and offer glimpses around blind corners. In particular, I argue that Nietzsch…Read more
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415To Honor our Heroes: Analysis of the Obituaries of Australians Killed in Action in WWI and WWII2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2021.Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, in particular…Read more
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414Elections, civic trust, and digital literacy: The promise of blockchain as a basis for common knowledgeNorthern European Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Few recent developments in information technology have been as hyped as blockchain, the first implementation of which was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Such hype furnishes ample reason to be skeptical about the promise of blockchain implementations, but I contend that there’s something to the hype. In particular, I think that certain blockchain implementations, in the right material, social, and political conditions, constitute excellent bases for common knowledge. As a case study, I focus on trus…Read more
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409Nietzsche's affective perspectivism as a philosophical methodologyIn Paul Loeb & Matthew Mayer (eds.), Nietzsche’s Metaphilosophy, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.Nietzsche’s perspectivism is a philosophical methodology for achieving various epistemic goods. Furthermore, perspectives as he conceives them relate primarily to agents’ motivational and evaluative sets. In order to shed light on this methodology, I approach it from two angles. First, I employ the digital humanities methodology pioneered recently in my recent and ongoing research to further elucidate the concept of perspectivism. Second, I explore some of the rhetorical tropes that Nietzsche us…Read more
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399Nietzsche's virtues: curiosity, courage, pathos of distance, sense of humor, and solitudeIn Christoph Halbig & Felix Timmermann (eds.), The Handbook of Virtue and Virtue Ethics, . 2021.
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387Nietzsche on humility and modestyIn Justin Steinberg (ed.), Humility: A History, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.Beginning with the Untimely Meditations (1873) and continuing until his final writings of 1888-9, Nietzsche refers to humility (Demuth or a cognate) in fifty-two passages and to modesty (Bescheidenheit or a cognate) in one hundred and four passages, yet there are only four passages that refer to both terms. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, he often speaks positively of modesty, especially in epistemic contexts. These curious facts might be expected to lead scholars to explore what Nietzsche think…Read more
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386A research program for empirically informed ethicsIn Empirically Informed Ethics, Springer. pp. 3-27. 2013.
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370Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social cooperationCritique of Anthropology. forthcoming.
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367Becoming less unreasonable: A reply to ShermanSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4 (7): 59-62. 2015.
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353Having a sense of humor as a virtueJournal of Value Inquiry 1-22. forthcoming.Could having a sense of humor be a virtue? In this paper, we argue for an affirmative answer to this question. Like other virtues, a sense of humor enhances and inhibits the expression of various emotions, especially amusement, contempt, trust, and hope. Someone possesses a virtuous sense of humor to the extent that they are well-disposed to appropriately enhance or inhibit these emotions in themselves and others through both embodied reactions (e.g., smiling, laughter, eyerolls) and language (e…Read more
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339Comments on Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 549-554. 2020.
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337Reactionary attitudes: Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter MovementIn Fernando Aguiar-Gonzalez & Antonio Gaitan (eds.), Experimental Methods in Moral Philosophy, Routledge. forthcoming.On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The…Read more
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334Expanding The Situationist Challenge To Responsibilist Virtue EpistemologyPhilosophical Quarterly 62 (247): 223-249. 2012.The last few decades have witnessed the birth and growth of both virtue epistemology and the situationist challenge to virtue ethics. It seems only natural that eventually we would see the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology. This article articulates one aspect of that new challenge by spelling out an argument against the responsibilist brand of virtue epistemology. The trouble can be framed as an inconsistent triad: many people know quite a bit; knowledge is true belief acquired and r…Read more
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330Automated psycholinguistic analysis of the Anglophone manosphereIn Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
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307The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkitIn Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè (eds.), Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1, Springer. 2023.The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter…Read more
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306A 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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300Krista K. Thomason, Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life, Oxford University Press, 2018.Criminal Justice Ethics. forthcoming.In Naked, Krista K. Thomason offers a multi-faceted account of shame, covering its nature as an emotion, its positive and negative roles in moral life, its association with violence, and its provocation through invitations to shame, public shaming, and stigmatization. Along the way, she reflects on a range of examples drawn from literature, memoirs, journalism, and her own imagination. She also considers alternative views at length, draws a wealth of important distinctions, and articulates many …Read more
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297The Most Agreeable of All Vices: Nietzsche as Virtue EpistemologistBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (4): 767-790. 2013.It’s been argued with some justice by commentators from Walter Kaufmann to Thomas Hurka that Nietzsche’s positive ethical position is best understood as a variety of virtue theory – in particular, as a brand of perfectionism. For Nietzsche, value flows from character. Less attention has been paid, however, to the details of the virtues he identifies for himself and his type. This neglect, along with Nietzsche’s frequent irony and non-standard usage, has obscured the fact that almost all the v…Read more
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291A tragic coalition of the rational and irrational: a threat to collective responses to COVID-19Philosophical Psychology (6). 2022.There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation measures may not succeed, which undermines people’s conditional willingness to join in on those efforts. Second, our evaluations of others’ willingness to …Read more
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288Fanaticism in the manosphereIn Paul Katsafanas (ed.), Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy, Rewriting the History of Philosophy. 2023.This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept the…Read more
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273Misinformation and disagreementIn Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Disagreement, Routledge. forthcoming.This chapter addresses the relationship between misinformation and disagreement. We begin by arguing that one traditional bogeyman in this domain, ideological polarization, does not account for the many problems that have been documented. Instead, affective polarization seems to be the root cause of most of these problems. We then discuss the relationships between moral outrage, misinformation, and affective polarization. We next turn to the political implications of affective polarization and c…Read more
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268The Affiliative Use of Emoji and Hashtags in the Black Lives Matter Movement in TwitterSocial Science Computer Review (N/A). 2022.Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platf…Read more
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265The 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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265Motivated numeracy and active reasoning in a Western European sampleBehavioral Public Policy 1. 2020.Recent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Wes…Read more
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265Current Controversies in Virtue Theory (edited book)Routledge. 2015.Virtue is among the most venerable concepts in philosophy, and has recently seen a major revival. However, new challenges to conceptions of virtue have also arisen. In _Current Controversies in Virtue Theory_, five pairs of cutting-edge philosophers square off over central topics in virtue theory: the nature of virtue, the connection between virtue and flourishing, the connection between moral and epistemic virtues, the way in which virtues are acquired, and the possibility of attaining virtue. …Read more
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246Varieties of moral motivation: Empirical perspectivesIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford University Press Usa. 2006.This chapter examines three recent empirical approaches to the study of moral motivation: moral foundations theory, deep pragmatism, and morality-as-cooperation. All three approaches conceptualize moral motivation as a suite of desires, emotions, sentiments, dispositions, values, and relationships that move people to think, judge, and act in accordance with morality. Moral foundations theory posits five or six basic foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and sometimes liberty…Read more
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236Moral Psychology: An IntroductionPolity. 2016.This book provides a rich, systematic, and accessible introduction to moral psychology, aimed at undergraduate philosophy and psychology majors. There are eight chapters, in addition to a short introduction, prospective conclusion, and extensive bibliography. The recipe for each chapter will be: a) to introduce a philosophical topic (e.g., altruism, virtue, preferences, rules) and some prominent positions on it, without assuming prior acquaintance on the part of the reader b) to canvass and ex…Read more
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233A normative framework for sharing information onlineIn Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2023.People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are …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 |