•  114
    Nudges to reason: not guilty
    Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (10): 723-723. 2018.
    I am to grateful to Geoff Keeling for his perceptive response1 to my paper.2 In this brief reply, I will argue that he does not succeed in his goal of showing that nudges to reason do not respect autonomy. At most, he establishes only that such nudges may threaten autonomy when used in certain ways and in certain circumstances. As I will show, this is not a conclusion that should give us grounds for particular concerns about nudges. Before turning to this issue, let me correct some small issues …Read more
  •  6
    Love is a central preoccupation of art and literature, of popular culture and autobiography. This book is an attempt to understand its central themes, to discover why love is so important to most of us, why we seek it, and why we so frequently fail to hold on to it. John Armstrong is a philosopher whose primary interest is aesthetics. Accordingly, his meditations on love often proceed by way of reflection upon works of art and literature.
  •  1
    Handbook on Neuroethics (edited book)
    with Jens Clausen
    Springer. 2014.
  •  87
    Strong hermeneutics: Contingency and moral identity
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2). 2001.
    Book Information Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. By Nicholas H. Smith. Routledge. London. 1997. Pp. x + 197. Paperback, £14.99.
  •  108
    Stepping Into the Present
    Social Theory and Practice 25 (3): 471-490. 1999.
  •  243
    Obsessive–compulsive disorder as a disorder of attention
    Mind and Language 33 (1): 3-16. 2018.
    An influential model holds that obsessive–compulsive disorder is caused by distinctive personality traits and belief biases. But a substantial number of sufferers do not manifest these traits. I propose a predictive coding account of the disorder, which explains both the symptoms and the cognitive traits. On this account, OCD centrally involves heightened and dysfunctionally focused attention to normally unattended sensory and motor representations. As these representations have contents that pr…Read more
  •  219
    Nudges in a post-truth world
    Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (8): 495-500. 2017.
    Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead,…Read more
  •  181
    Conspiracy Theories (review)
    Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 24 (1-2): 47-48. 2004.
  •  408
    Am I a Racist? Implicit Bias and the Ascription of Racism
    Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268): 534-551. 2017.
    There is good evidence that many people harbour attitudes that conflict with those they endorse. In the language of social psychology, they seem to have implicit attitudes that conflict with their explicit beliefs. There has been a great deal of attention paid to the question whether agents like this are responsible for actions caused by their implicit attitudes, but much less to the question whether they can rightly be described as racist in virtue of harbouring them. In this paper, I attempt t…Read more
  • Preface
    In James J. Giordano & Bert Gordijn (eds.), Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
  •  66
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  63
    The Prehistory of Archaeology: Heidegger and the Early Foucault
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27 (2): 157-175. 1996.
  •  276
    There is a robust scientific consensus concerning climate change and evolution. But many people reject these expert views, in favour of beliefs that are strongly at variance with the evidence. It is tempting to try to explain these beliefs by reference to ignorance or irrationality, but those who reject the expert view seem often to be no worse informed or any less rational than the majority of those who accept it. It is also tempting to try to explain these beliefs by reference to epistemic ove…Read more
  •  116
    Introduction: Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics (review)
    Neuroethics 3 (3): 197-200. 2010.
  •  81
    There May Be Costs to Failing to Enhance, as Well as to Enhancing
    American Journal of Bioethics 13 (7): 38-39. 2013.
    No abstract
  •  264
      Proponents of evolutionary psychology take the existence of humanuniversals to constitute decisive evidence in favor of their view. Ifthe same social norms are found in culture after culture, we have goodreason to believe that they are innate, they argue. In this paper Ipropose an alternative explanation for the existence of humanuniversals, which does not depend on them being the product of inbuiltpsychological adaptations. Following the work of Brian Skyrms, I suggestthat if a particular con…Read more
  •  91
    Review of moral psychology, volume 1, the evolution of morality (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3). 2009.
    No abstract
  •  191
    Dissolving the Puzzle of Resultant Moral Luck
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1): 127-139. 2016.
    The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. One popular perspective on resultant moral luck explains our dispositions to produce different judgments with regard to the agents who feature in these cases as a product not of what they genuinely deserve but of our epistemic situation. On this account, there is no genuine resultant moral luck; there is only luck in wha…Read more
  •  159
    Morality on the brain (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 54 (54): 108-109. 2011.
  •  736
    What (if anything) is wrong with bestiality?
    Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (3). 2003.
  •  91
  •  155
    The wisdom of the pack
    Philosophical Explorations 9 (1). 2006.
    This short article is a reply to Fine's criticisms of Haidt's social intuitionist model of moral judgement. After situating Haidt in the landscape of meta-ethical views, I examine Fine's argument, against Haidt, that the processes which give rise to moral judgements are amenable to rational control: first-order moral judgements, which are automatic, can nevertheless deliberately be brought to reflect higher-order judgements. However, Haidt's claims about the arationality of moral judgements seem…Read more
  •  804
    Analytic and continental philosophy: Explaining the differences
    Metaphilosophy 34 (3): 284-304. 2003.
    A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy.I suggest that these attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious.I argue that analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy conducted within a paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less in the way of shared presuppositions, proble…Read more
  •  77
  •  277
    Epistemic Akrasia and the Subsumption of Evidence: A Reconsideration
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 149-156. 2004.
    According to one influential view, advanced by Jonathan Adler, David Owens and Susan Hurley, epistemic akrasia is impossible because when we form a full belief, any apparent evidence against that belief loses its power over us. Thus theoretical reasoning is quite unlike practical reasoning, in that in the latter our desires continue to exert a pull, even when they are outweighed by countervailing considerations. I call this argument against the possibility of epistemic akrasia the subsumption vi…Read more
  •  28
    Sartre
    ONEWorld Publications. 2002.
    This introduction traces the philosophical achievements of a thinker sonfluential that his death in 1980 brought 50,000 people on to the streets ofaris. The account of Jean-Paul Sartre - writer, journalist and intellectualornerstone of the 20th century - stretches from his early existential phaseo his later Marxist beliefs. With coverage of such major contemporary issuess human liberty, sociobiology, the ethics of work, and the influence ofenetics on ideas of individual freedom, Neil Levy uses a…Read more