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106Experimental 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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2134Experimental 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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340A 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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43Identifying 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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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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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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392Becoming 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
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 |