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37Nietzsche’s Virtues: Curiosity, Courage, Pathos of Distance, Sense of Humor, and SolitudeIn Christoph Halbig & Felix Timmermann (eds.), Handbuch Tugend Und Tugendethik, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 271-286. 2021.The contours of Nietzsche’s socio-moral framework are idiosyncratic when compared to contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Nietzsche starts with a naturalistic conception of drives, instincts, and types of people. He then moves in a normative direction by identifying some drives and instincts as virtues – at least for certain types of people in particular social and cultural contexts. Much of Nietzsche’s understanding of virtue must therefore be understood relative to a type of person and…Read more
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1318The functions of shame in NietzscheIn Raffaele Rodogno & Alessandra Fussi (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Shame, Rowman & Littlefield. forthcoming.Nietzsche talks about shame [scham*, schmach*, schand*] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to shame in over one hundred passages – at least five times as often as he refers to resentment/ressentiment. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and shame includes just a handful of publications, while the literature on Nietzsche and resentment includes over a thousand. Arguably, this disproportionate engagement has been driven by the fact…Read more
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61Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: the case of YouTube’s recommender systemSynthese 199 (1): 835-858. 2020.YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served t…Read more
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490On the Uses and Abuses of Celebrity Epistemic PowerSocial Epistemology. forthcoming.The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under close scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial justice not to undermine trust in authoritative sources by spreading misinformation or directing attention to untrustworthy sources. Moreover, c…Read more
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43Towards a Genealogy of Forward-Looking ResponsibilityThe Monist 104 (4): 498-509. 2021.I propose an account of how our forward-looking moral and epistemic responsibility practices arose, how they related to backward-looking responsibility practices, and what makes them stable. This account differs in several ways from prominent theories already in the literature. Traditionally, forward-looking accounts of responsibility are framed third-personally in terms of social control and neglect the perspective and agency of the responsible person. The account I develop allows that there ar…Read more
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57Moral Molecules: Morality as a Combinatorial SystemReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4): 1039-1058. 2022.What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them …Read more
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13Elections, Civic Trust, and Digital Literacy: The Promise of Blockchain as a Basis for Common KnowledgeSATS 22 (1): 97-110. 2021.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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58The Development and Validation of the Epistemic Vice ScaleReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-28. forthcoming.This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy…Read more
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269The 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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113Virtues for agents in directed social networksSynthese 199 (3-4): 8423-8442. 2021.In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who…Read more
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293Motivated 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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18Moral reasoning is the process of asking moral questions and answering themBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Reasoning is the iterative, path-dependent process of asking questions and answering them. Moral reasoning is a species of such reasoning, so it is a matter of asking and answering moral questions, which requires both creativity and curiosity. As such, interventions and practices that help people ask more and better moral questions promise to improve moral reasoning.
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440To 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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19Two and a Half Cheers for Digital Humanities: Responses to Bamford, Cristy, and ReginsterJournal of Nietzsche Studies 51 (2): 265-272. 2020.ABSTRACT This article is a reply to critical commentaries by Rebecca Bamford, Rachel Cristy, and Bernard Reginster on my 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology, invited by the North American Nietzsche Society for presentation at a book symposium planned for the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
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355Comments on Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 549-554. 2020.
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28Comments on Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 549-554. 2020.
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428Elections, 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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750More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish CofnasPhilosophical Psychology 33 (7): 893-898. 2020.This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review process and resulted in substantial revisions.
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406Nietzsche 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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84Social Virtue Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2022.Explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Chapters are divided into four sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements.
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13Nudges and Other Moral Technologies in the Context of Power: Assigning and Accepting ResponsibilityIn David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 235-248. 2018.Strawson argues that we should understand moral responsibility in terms of our practices of holding responsible and taking responsibility. The former covers what is commonly referred to as backward-looking responsibility, while the latter covers what is commonly referred to as forward-looking responsibility. We consider new technologies and interventions that facilitate assignment of responsibility. Assigning responsibility is best understood as the second- or third-personal analog of taking res…Read more
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3225We are addressing this letter to the editors of Philosophical Psychology after reading an article they decided to publish in the recent vol. 33, issue 1. The article is by Nathan Cofnas and is entitled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (2020). The purpose of our letter is not to invite Cofnas’s contribution into a broader dialogue, but to respectfully voice our concerns about the decision to publish the manuscript, which, in our opinion, fails to meet a r…Read more
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1636Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: The case of YouTube’s recommender systemSynthese (1-2): 1-24. 2020.YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served t…Read more
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544Negative Epistemic ExemplarsIn Stacey Goguen & Benjamin Sherman (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, Rowman & Littlefield. 2019.In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtuetheoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases…Read more
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1173Vulnerability in Social Epistemic NetworksInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5): 1-23. 2020.Social epistemologists should be well-equipped to explain and evaluate the growing vulnerabilities associated with filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization in social media. However, almost all social epistemology has been built for social contexts that involve merely a speaker-hearer dyad. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization all presuppose much larger and more complex network structures. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for a properly social epistemology that g…Read more
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1039Trust in a social and digital worldSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (8): 1-8. 2019.
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417Nietzsche'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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604Vectors of epistemic insecurityIn Ian James Kidd, Quassim Cassam & Heather Battaly (eds.), Vice Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.Epistemologists have addressed a variety of modal epistemic standings, such as sensitivity, safety, risk, and epistemic virtue. These concepts mark out the ways that beliefs can fail to track the truth, articulate the conditions needed for knowledge, and indicate ways to become a better epistemic agent. However, it is our contention that current ways of carving up epistemic modality ignore the complexities that emerge when individuals are embedded within a community and listening to a variety of…Read more
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472Humility 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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956Ethical pitfalls for natural language processing in psychologyIn Morteza Dehghani & Ryan Boyd (eds.), The Atlas of Language Analysis in Psychology, Guilford Press. forthcoming.Knowledge is power. Knowledge about human psychology is increasingly being produced using natural language processing (NLP) and related techniques. The power that accompanies and harnesses this knowledge should be subject to ethical controls and oversight. In this chapter, we address the ethical pitfalls that are likely to be encountered in the context of such research. These pitfalls occur at various stages of the NLP pipeline, including data acquisition, enrichment, analysis, storage, and shar…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 |