Hanno Sauer

Philosophers and psychologists love psychopaths. They seem like a test case which was tailor-made for them to probe their most contested claims and theories. What is the psychological basis of moral judgment? Are moral beliefs intrinsically motivational? How should psychological disorders be defined, if they should be defined at all? Under what conditions can agents be reasonably held responsible for their conduct?Being Amoral. Psychopathy and Moral Incapacity, edited by Thomas Schramme brings together some of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy and its philosophical implications. The book contains 12 original articles which are grouped into three sections: Moral Capacities and Incapacities , Issues in Moral Psychology , and Social Aspects: Blame, Transgression, and Dangerousness .The articles in this section are concerned with identifying the capacities or, rather, lack of capacities ..

What is the connection between emotions and moral judgments? Neo-sentimentalism maintains that to say that something is morally wrong is to think it appropriate to resent other people for doing it or to feel guilty upon doing it oneself. But intuitively, it seems that there is no way to characterize the content of guilt and resentment independent from the fact that these emotions respond to morally wrong actions. In response to this problem of circularity, modern forms of sentimentalism have favoured a ‘no-priority view’, arguing that judgments of moral wrongness cannot be reduced to expressions of feelings of guilt and resentment, but that emotional responses and moral judgments mutually elucidate each other. In the present contribution, I argue that this strategy is not successful: the problem of circularity returns at a deeper level of the account, a level at which the ‘no-priority view’ can no longer escape it. The concept of ‘appropriateness’ that is invoked by neo-sentimentalism is liable to the so-called ‘conflation-problem’: it fails to distinguish between right and wrong kinds of appropriateness. In order to draw that important distinction, neo-sentimentalism has to presuppose a substantive notion of moral wrongness already. Moreover, I show that the most influential contemporary attempts to achieve an independent, non-circular ‘fix’ on the emotions fail for one of the following three reasons: they either cease to be sentimentalist, for capture the normative dimension of moral judgment or end up being circular again

People asymmetrically attribute various agential features such as intentionality, knowledge, or causal impact to other agents when something of normative significance is at stake. I will argue that three questions are of primary interest in the debate about this effect. A methodological question about how to explain it at all; a substantive question about how to explain it correctly: and a normative question about whether to explain it in terms of an error or a legitimate judgmental pattern. The problem, I argue, is that these three questions are difficult to disentangle. I propose a solution to this problem, and show how it accounts for the most recent data regarding the effect

Do people have character traits? What is happiness? These two questions seem at best loosely related to each other, but The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness, edited by Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno does a formidable job at showing how intimately connected they are, and how fruitful it can be to bring the concepts and theories developed in debates about the former to bear on issues concerning the latter, and vice versa.The present volume brings together some of the world’s leading experts on situationism, virtue, and well-being. It gives both an enlightening overview of the current state of research about those topics, as well as detailed discussions of more particular issues. The book contains 14 original articles , which are divided into four parts: Persons, Situation, and Virtue , The Moral Psychology of Virtue , Asian Philosophy and Psychology on Virtue and Happiness , and Happiness (4 ..

In this paper, we argue that the so-called Knobe-Effect constitutes an error. There is now a wealth of data confirming that people are highly prone to what has also come to be known as the ‘side-effect effect’. That is, when attributing psychological states—such as intentionality, foreknowledge, and desiring—as well as other agential features—such as causal control—people typically do so to a greater extent when the action under consideration is evaluated negatively. There are a plethora of models attempting to account for this effect. We hold that the central question of interest is whether the effect represents a competence or an error in judgment. We offer a systematic argument for the claim that the burden of proof regarding this question is on the competence theorist. We sketch an account, based on the notion of the reactive attitudes, that can accommodate both the idea that these sorts of judgments are fundamentally normative and that they often constitute errors