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175Philosophy’s other climate problem☆Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (4): 536-553. 2021.Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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97Philosophy’s other climate problem☆Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (4): 536-553. 2021.Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 536-553, Winter 2021.
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17Not So Hypocritical After All: Belief Revision Is Adaptive and Often UnnoticedIn Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library, Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 41-61. 2021.We are all apt to alter our beliefs and even our principles to suit the prevailing winds. Examples abound in public life, but we are all subject to similar reversals. We often accuse one another of hypocrisy when these kinds of reversals occur. Sometimes the accusation is justified. In this paper, however, I will argue that in many such cases, we don’t manifest hypocrisy, even if our change of mind is not in response to new evidence. Marshalling evidence from psychology and evolutionary theory, …Read more
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327The effective and ethical development of artificial intelligence: An opportunity to improve our wellbeingAustralian Council of Learned Academies. 2019.This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number CS170100008); the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ACOLA collaborates with the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi to deliver the interdisciplinary Horizon Scanning reports to government. The aims of the project which produced this report are: 1. Examine th…Read more
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68Beta adrenergic blockade reduces utilitarian judgementBiological Psychology 92 (2): 323-328. 2013.Noradrenergic pathways are involved in mediating the central and peripheral effects of physiological arousal. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of noradrenergic transmission in moral decision-making. We studied the effects in healthy volunteers of propranolol (a noradrenergic beta-adrenoceptor antagonist) on moral judgement in a set of moral dilemmas pitting utilitarian outcomes (e.g., saving five lives) against highly aversive harmful actions (e.g., killing an innocent pe…Read more
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553Are You Morally Modified?: The Moral Effects of Widely Used PharmaceuticalsPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (2): 111-125. 2014.A number of concerns have been raised about the possible future use of pharmaceuticals designed to enhance cognitive, affective, and motivational processes, particularly where the aim is to produce morally better decisions or behavior. In this article, we draw attention to what is arguably a more worrying possibility: that pharmaceuticals currently in widespread therapeutic use are already having unintended effects on these processes, and thus on moral decision making and morally significant beh…Read more
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29Are we responsible for our characters?Ethic@ - An International Journal for Moral Philosophy 1 (2). 2002.A number of philosophers have argued in recent years that we are each, typically, responsible for our characters; for what we are, as well as what we do. This paper demonstrates that this is true only of the basically virtuous person; the basically vicious are not responsible for their characters. I establish this claim through a detailed examination of the conditions upon the attribution of moral responsibility. Most accounts of moral responsibility claim that it is only appropriately attribute…Read more
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53Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityLexington Books. 2013.Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications
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96Persistent Vegetative State, Akinetic Mutism and ConsciousnessIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Finding Consciousness: The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage, Oxford University Press. pp. 122-136. 2016.
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69When Is Company Unwelcome?Episteme 20 (1): 101-106. 2023.In a recent paper in this journal, Joshua Blanchard has identified a novel problem: the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. We find ourselves in unwelcome epistemic company when we hold a belief that is also held mainly or most prominently by those we regard as morally or epistemically bad. Blanchard argues that some, but not all, unwelcome epistemic company provides higher-order evidence against our belief. But he doesn't provide a test for when company is unwelcome or a diagnosis of why it…Read more
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34Suspiciously Convenient BeliefEthical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (5): 899-913. 2020.Moral judgments entail or consist in claims that certain ways of behaving are called for. These actions have expectable consequences. I will argue that these consequences are suspiciously benign: on controversial issues, each side assesses these consequences, measured in dispute-independent goods, as significantly better than the consequences of behaving in the ways their opponents recommend. This remains the case even when we have not formed our moral judgment by assessing consequences. I will …Read more
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561Does encouraging a belief in determinism increase cheating? Reconsidering the value of believing in free willCognition 203 (C): 104342. 2020.A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four prereg…Read more
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66The Surprising Truth About DisagreementActa Analytica 36 (2): 137-157. 2020.Conciliationism—the thesis that when epistemic peers discover that they disagree about a proposition, both should reduce their confidence—faces a major objection: it seems to require us to significantly reduce our confidence in our central moral and political commitments. In this paper, I develop a typology of disagreement cases and a diagnosis of the source and force of the pressure to conciliate. Building on Vavova’s work, I argue that ordinary and extreme disagreements are surprising, and for…Read more
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317Virtue signalling is virtuousSynthese 198 (10): 9545-9562. 2020.The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is virtue signalling, because virtue signalling …Read more
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25Rationalization enables cooperation and cultural evolutionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.Cushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulative cultural evolution.
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339Disease, Normality, and Current Pharmacological Moral ModificationPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (2): 135-137. 2014.Response to commentary. We are grateful to Crockett and Craigie for their interesting remarks on our paper. We accept Crockett’s claim that there is a need for caution in drawing inferences about patient groups from work on healthy volunteers in the laboratory. However, we believe that the evidence we cited established a strong presumption that many of the patients who are routinely taking a medication, including many people properly prescribed the medication for a medical condition, have mora…Read more
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282No-Platforming and Higher-Order Evidence, or Anti-Anti-No-PlatformingJournal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4): 487-502. 2019.No-platforming—the refusal to allow those who espouse views seen as inflammatory the opportunity to speak in certain forums—is very controversial. Proponents typically cite the possibility of harms to disadvantaged groups and, sometimes, epistemically paternalistic considerations. Opponents invoke the value of free speech and respect for intellectual autonomy in favor of more open speech, arguing that the harms that might arise from bad speech are best addressed by rebuttal, not silencing. In th…Read more
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1Belie the belief? Prompts and default statesReligion, Brain and Behavior. forthcoming.Sometimes agents sincerely profess to believe a claim and yet act inconsistently with it in some contexts. In this paper, I focus on mismatch cases in the domain of religion. I distinguish between two kinds of representations: prompts and default states. Prompts are representations that must be salient to agents in order for them to play their belief-appropriate roles, whereas default states play these roles automatically. The need for access characteristic of prompts is explained by their vehic…Read more
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25Applying Brown and Savulescu: the diachronic condition as excuseJournal of Medical Ethics 45 (10): 646-647. 2019.In applied ethics, debates about responsibility have been relentlessly individualistic and synchronic, even as recognition has increased in both philosophy and psychology that agency is distributed across time and individuals. I therefore warmly welcome Brown and Savulescu’s analysis of the conditions under which responsibility can be shared and extended. By carefully delineating how diachronic and dyadic responsibility interact with the long-established control and epistemic conditions, they la…Read more
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60Putting the Luck Back Into Moral LuckMidwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1): 59-74. 2019.Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.
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162Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink: Nudging is Giving ReasonsErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6. 2019.
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530Knowledge From Vice: Deeply Social EpistemologyMind 129 (515): 887-915. 2020.In the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion in conceptions of epistemic agency beyond the individualism characteristic of most earlier epistemology. We…Read more
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82Taking Responsibility for ResponsibilityPublic Health Ethics 12 (2): 103-113. 2019.Governments, physicians, media and academics have all called for individuals to bear responsibility for their own health. In this article, I argue that requiring those with adverse health outcomes to bear responsibility for these outcomes is a bad basis for policy. The available evidence strongly suggests that the capacities for responsible choice, and the circumstances in which these capacities are exercised, are distributed alongside the kinds of goods we usually talk about in discussing distr…Read more
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108Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, by Doris, John M.: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. xii + 264, £30 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (3): 605-608. 2016.
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98Are We Agents at All? Helen Steward's Agency IncompatibilismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (4): 386-399. 2013.ABSTRACT In A Metaphysics for Freedom and related papers, Helen Steward advances a new argument for incompatibilism. Though she concedes that the luck objection is persuasive with regard to existing versions of libertarianism, she claims that agency itself is incompatible with determinism: we are only agents at all if we are able to settle matters concerning our movements, where settling something requires that prior to our settling it lacked sufficient conditions. She argues that genuine agents…Read more
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380Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy TheoriesEpisteme 4 (2): 181-192. 2007.Abstract The typical explanation of an event or process which attracts the label ‘conspiracy theory’ is an explanation that conflicts with the account advanced by the relevant epistemic authorities. I argue that both for the layperson and for the intellectual, it is almost never rational to accept such a conspiracy theory. Knowledge is not merely shallowly social, in the manner recognized by social epistemology, it is also constitutively social: many kinds of knowledge only become accessible tha…Read more
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52In Praise of OutsourcingContemporary Pragmatism 15 (3): 344-365. 2018.What explains the context sensitivity of some (apparent) beliefs? Why, for example, do religious beliefs appear to control behaviour in some contexts but not others? Cases like this are heterogeneous, and we may require a matching heterogeneity of explanations, ranging over their contents, the attitudes of agents and features of the environment. In this paper, I put forward a hypothesis of the last kind. I argue that some beliefs (religious and non-religious) are coupled to cues, which either tr…Read more
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58Taking responsibility for health in an epistemically polluted environmentTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 39 (2): 123-141. 2018.Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibilit…Read more
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University of OxfordRegular Faculty (Part-time)
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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |