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793Nudges and other moral technologies in the context of power: Assigning and accepting responsibilityIn Boonin David (ed.), Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave. 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 analogue of takin…Read more
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746The Seduction of Winston SmithIn Ezio Di Nucci & Stefan Storrie (eds.), 1984 and philosophy, is resistance futile?, Open Court. 2018.On the first page of 1984, Winston Smith is confronted with several posters featuring the face of Big Brother and the famous sentence, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” This may not seem like a promising way to seduce someone, but the seduction of Winston Smith by Big Brother in 1984 is a most unusual love story. I call it a seduction because Winston’s mind and heart are slowly won over in the aptly-named Ministry of Love. Moreover, in the final scene of the novel, Winston gazes, with tears in his …Read more
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656Digital humanities for history of philosophy: A case study on NietzscheIn T. Neilson L. Levenberg D. Rheems & M. Thomas (ed.), Handbook of Methods in the Digital Humanities, Rowman & Littlefield. forthcoming.Nietzsche promises to “translate man back into nature,” but it remains unclear what he meant by this and to what extent he succeeded at it. To help come to grips with Nietzsche’s conceptions of drive (Trieb), instinct (Instinkt) and virtue (Tugend and/or Keuschheit), I develop novel digital humanities methods to systematically track his use of these terms, constructing a near-comprehensive catalogue of what he takes these dispositions to be and how he thinks they are related. Nietzsche individua…Read more
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569Virtue EpistemologyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1-51. 1999.Contemporary virtue epistemology (hereafter ‘VE’) is a diverse collection of approaches to epistemology. At least two central tendencies are discernible among the approaches. First, they view epistemology as a normative discipline. Second, they view intellectual agents and communities as the primary focus of epistemic evaluation, with a focus on the intellectual virtues and vices embodied in and expressed by these agents and communities. This entry introduces many of the most important results o…Read more
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789Identifying Virtues and Values Through Obituary Data-MiningJournal of Value Inquiry 52 (1). 2018.Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author finds most salient but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several…Read more
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2376Twenty-first century perspectivism: The role of emotions in scientific inquiryStudi di Estetica 7 (1): 65-79. 2017.How should emotions figure in scientific practice? I begin by distinguishing three broad answers to this question, ranging from pessimistic to optimistic. Confirmation bias and motivated numeracy lead us to cast a jaundiced eye on the role of emotions in scientific inquiry. However, reflection on the essential motivating role of emotions in geniuses makes it less clear that science should be evacuated of emotion. I then draw on Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism to articulate a twenty-first cen…Read more
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934Extended knowledge, the recognition heuristic, and epistemic injusticeIn Duncan Pritchard, Jesper Kallestrup, Orestis Palermos & Adam Carter (eds.), Extended Knowledge, Oxford University Press. pp. 239-256. 2018.We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recogniti…Read more
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76Emotions in the Moral Life, by Robert RobertsMind 123 (492): 1238-1242. 2014.Robert Roberts’s fourth secular and eleventh total monograph, Emotions in the Moral Life, exemplifies his characteristic insight, depth, earnestness, humanity, and religious commitment. Poised midway between Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Attention to Virtues (in progress), Emotions in the Moral Life draws on the resources Roberts has already developed for analysing emotions as concerned-based construals in order to show how such c…Read more
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443The 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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115Wilde heuristics and Rum Tum Tuggers: preference indeterminacy and instabilitySynthese 189 (S1): 5-15. 2012.Models in decision theory and game theory assume that preferences are determinate: for any pair of possible outcomes, a and b, an agent either prefers a to b, prefers b to a, or is indifferent as between a and b. Preferences are also assumed to be stable: provided the agent is fully informed, trivial situational influences will not shift the order of her preferences. Research by behavioral economists suggests, however, that economic and hedonic preferences are to some degree indeterminate and uns…Read more
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110Virtues (edited book)The Monist. 2016.Some virtues, like courage and temperance, have been part of the philosophical tradition since its inception. Others, like filial piety and female chastity, have gone out of style. Still others, like curiosity and aesthetic good taste, are upstarts. What, if anything, can be said in general about this motley collection? Are they all dispositions to respond to reasons? Do they share characteristic components, such as affect, emotion, and trust? Are they organized into a cardinal hierarchy, or is …Read more
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161Cushman, Young, & Greene (2010) urge the consolidation of moral psychology around a dual-system consensus. On this view, a slow, often-overstretched rational system tends to produce consequentialist intuitions and action-tendencies, while a fast, affective system produces virtuous (or vicious) intuitions and action-tendencies that perform well in their habituated ecological niche but sometimes disastrously outside of it. This perspective suggests a habit-corrected-by-reason picture of moral beha…Read more
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45Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Placebo Effects and Informed Consent”American Journal of Bioethics 15 (10): 1-3. 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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810How one becomes what one is called: On the relation between traits and trait-terms in NietzscheJournal of Nietzsche Studies 46 (1): 261-269. 2015.Despite the recent surge of interest in Nietzsche’s moral psychology and his conceptions of character and virtue in particular, little attention has been paid to his treatment of the relation between character traits and the terms that designate them. In this paper, I argue for an interpretation of this relation: Nietzsche thinks there is a looping effect between the psychological disposition named by a character trait-term and the practice of using that term.
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4950Identifying 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 assumpt…Read more
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722A Schooling in Contempt: Emotions and the pathos of distanceIn Paul Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophical Minds: The Nietzschean Mind, Routledge. 2018.Nietzsche scholars have developed an interest in his use of “thick” moral psychological concepts such as virtues and emotions. This development coincides with a renewed interest among both philosophers and social scientists in virtues, the emotions, and moral psychology more generally. Contemporary work in empirical moral psychology posits contempt and disgust as both basic emotions and moral foundations of normative codes. While virtues can be individuated in various ways, one attractive princi…Read more
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466Christoph 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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1017A multi-modal, cross-cultural study of the semantics of intellectual humilityAI and Society. forthcoming.Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable to acquire more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, 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 ex- presses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyz…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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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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707Epistemic 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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1356Nietzsche, 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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2131Experimental 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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105Experimental 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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335A 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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159Reversing 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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11Visualizing 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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39Simon 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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1712Placebo 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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660How 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
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 |