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513The Typicality Effect in Basic NeedsSynthese 200 (5): 1-26. 2022.According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationaliz…Read more
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320Experimental Philosophical Bioethics and Normative InferenceTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3-4): 91-111. 2021.This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situ…Read more
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31New Findings on Unconsented Intimate Exams Suggest Racial Bias and Gender ParityHastings Center Report 52 (2): 7-9. 2022.Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 7-9, March‐April 2022.
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436Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmasCognition and Emotion 36 (1): 137-153. 2022.At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for util…Read more
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365Purposes in law and in life: An experimental investigation of purpose attributionCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. forthcoming.There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both case…Read more
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79Experimental Philosophical Bioethics of Personal IdentityIn Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self, Bloomsbury. pp. 183-202. 2022.The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought to understand the cognitive processes and eliciting factors that shape ordinary people’s judgments about personal identity and the self. Still more re…Read more
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An experimental guide to vehicles in the parkJudgment and Decision Making 15 (3): 312-329. 2020.Prescriptive rules guide human behavior across various domains of community life, including law, morality, and etiquette. What, specifically, are rules in the eyes of their subjects, i.e., those who are expected to abide by them? Over the last sixty years, theorists in the philosophy of law have offered a useful framework with which to consider this question. Some, following H. L. A. Hart, argue that a rule’s text at least sometimes suffices to determine whether the rule itself covers a case. Others…Read more
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36Advancing Methods in Empirical Bioethics: Bioxphi Meets Digital TechnologiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (6): 53-56. 2021.Historically, empirical research in bioethics has drawn on methods developed within the social sciences, including qualitative interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies, and opinion surveys, t...
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50How pills undermine skills: Moralization of cognitive enhancement and causal selectionConsciousness and Cognition 91 (C): 103120. 2021.Despite the promise to boost human potential and wellbeing, enhancement drugs face recurring ethical scrutiny. The present studies examined attitudes toward cognitive enhancement in order to learn more about these ethical concerns, who has them, and the circumstances in which they arise. Fairness-based concerns underlay opposition to competitive use—even though enhancement drugs were described as legal, accessible and affordable. Moral values also influenced how subsequent rewards were causally …Read more
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699Questioning the Causal Inheritance PrincipleTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 25 (3): 261-277. 2010.Mental causation, though a forceful intuition embedded in our commonsense psychology, is difficult to square with the rest of commitments of physicalism about the mind. Advocates of mental causation have found solace in the causal inheritance principle, according to which the mental properties of mental statesshare the causal powers of their physical counterparts. In this paper, I present a variety of counterarguments to causal inheritance and conclude that the conditions for causal inheritance …Read more
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20Can Cosmopolitan Impartiality be NaturalizedPraxis 2 (1). 2009.This paper sets out asking what is to be gained from grounding the pursuit of a cosmopolitan morality in the evolutionary history of our morals, namely, by ascertaining some of the natural constraints under which normative ethical theory must operate. In Section II, I review two major forms of altruism: kin-based and reciprocal altruism. Experimental evidence is cited to support the view that biological altruism involves a carefully self-interested calculation to enhance adaptive fitness to the …Read more
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12Diet-ética: ¿consumo local o comercio justo?Isegoría 41 277-285. 2009.En su libro The Way We Eat, Peter Singer pretende concienciarnos sobre la ética del comer y los gastos ocultos, para el medioambiente y para los más pobres, de la dieta típica del primer mundo. A partir del análisis crítico de la industria alimentaria, presenta tres propuestas para el lector concienciado: el consumo local, el comercio justo y el vegetarianismo. A pesar de los beneficios ecológicos del consumo local, otras vías para proteger el medioambiente que no impiden el desarrollo económico…Read more
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54Intencionalidad sin naturalismo biológicoRevista de Filosofía (Madrid) 36 (1): 139-153. 2011.The Chinese Room argument is a variant of Turing’s test which enables Searle to defend his biological naturalism, according to which computation is neither sufficient nor constitutive of the mind. In this paper, I examine both strands of his anticomputationalist stance, argue that computation is constitutive of natural language understanding and suggest a path toward the physicalist reduction of intentionality for propositional speech acts