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288De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgmentMind and Language 34 (3): 317-338. 2019.Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment.…Read more
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377Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on LawCognitive Science 45 (8). 2021.Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws a…Read more
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24Noción de daño y su rol en los juicios morales. Un debate abiertoDaimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 82 157-170. 2021.Investigadores pertenecientes a la tradición de la psicología del desarrollo cognitivo han llevado a cabo estudios que sugieren que existe un vínculo entre la percepción de daño y el dominio moral. Frente a esta propuesta unificadora del dominio moral han surgido críticas desde la psicología cultural. Haidt publicó en 1993 uno de los estudios más influyentes en esta línea, afirmando haber encontrado evidencia que sugiere la existencia de dominios morales no vinculados a la noción de daño. En est…Read more
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75Viewing Others as Equals: the Non-cognitive Roots of Shared IntentionalityReview of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3): 485-502. 2018.We propose two adjustments to the classic view of shared intentionality as based on conceptual-level cognitive skills. The first one takes into account that infants and young children display this capacity, but lack conceptual-level cognitive skills. The second one seeks to integrate cognitive and non-cognitive skills into that capacity. This second adjustment is motivated by two facts. First, there is an enormous difference between human infants and our closest living primate relatives with res…Read more
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8La Neuropsicología Del Juicio Moral. Sobre Las Causas de Respuestas Contraintuitivas a Los Dilemas MoralesPraxis Filosófica 38 89-106. 2014.Una literatura creciente en neuropsicología estudia el juicio moral aplicando dilemas morales a personas con daños neuronales o con rasgos de personalidad antisocial; y parece confirmar una tendencia al juicio utilitarista contra-intuitivo, es decir, estas personas aprueban el sacrificio de un inocente para salvar varias vidas. Argumentamos que las evidencias encontradas no respaldan la hipótesis de dos módulos morales (Greene et al. 2004), sino más bien una disfunción en la capacidad empática o…Read more
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15Against the Evolutionary Debunking of Morality: Deconstructing a Philosophical MythIn Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library, Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 135-150. 2021.Evolutionary ethics debunks moral realism – or value realism in general – but this is not the same as debunking the authority of moral claims, for moral realism is not the only possible explanation of the source of moral authority. However, a few influential evolutionary philosophers do believe that evolution debunks not just moral realism, but morality, period. My main purpose in this paper is to highlight the difference between these two versions of debunking, and to extricate evolutionary the…Read more
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670Is a bad will a weak will? Cognitive dispositions modulate folk attributions of weakness of willPhilosophical Explorations 21 (3). 2018.In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent’s violations of best judgment and/or resolution, and by the moral valence of the agent’s action? (2) Do any of these influences depend on the cognitive dispositions of the judging individual? We implemented a factorial 2x2x2 between–subjects design with judgment violation, resolution violation, and action …Read more
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294Perceiving utilitarian gradients: Heart rate variability and self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma taskSocial Neuroscience 16 (4). 2021.It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitarian gradients as a measure of performance. We confronted participants (N = 82) with a set of five dilemmas evoking a gradient of mean utilitarian respo…Read more
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42Decision conflict drives reaction times and utilitarian responses in sacrificial dilemmasJudgment and Decision Making 14 555-564. 2019.In the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of the norm against killing and endorse the utilitarian perspective. However, a conflict model has been proposed more recently to account for part of the e…Read more
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27Extreme time-pressure reveals utilitarian intuitions in sacrificial dilemmasThinking and Reasoning 26 (4): 534-551. 2020.Studies with sacrificial moral dilemmas capture human variation in moral attitudes towards an extreme case of moral conflict between utilitarian and deontological principles. In this moral task, th...
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31Rationalization and Reflection Differentially Modulate Prior Attitudes Toward the Purity DomainCognitive Science 43 (6). 2019.Outside Western, predominantly secular‐liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the so‐called purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self‐harm, or harm to one's family and the wider community—a result which we replicate in Study 1. We then distinguish two cognitive processes that could generate …Read more
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3680The Ship of Theseus PuzzleIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 158-174. 2020.Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-t…Read more
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90Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregard…Read more
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738La moral y sus sombras: la racionalidad instrumental y la evolución de las normas de equidadCritica 37 (110): 79-104. 2005.Los sociobiólogos han defendido una posición "calvinista" que se resume en la siguiente fórmula: si la selección natural explica las actitudes morales, no hay altruismo genuino en la moral; si la moral es altruista, entonces la selección natural no puede explicarla. En este ensayo desenmascaro los presupuestos erróneos de esta posición y defiendo que el altruismo como equidad no es incompatible con la selección natural. Rechazo una concepción hobbesiana de la moral, pero sugiero su empleo en la …Read more
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51Kant and the Natural Science of OrganismsIdeas Y Valores 57 (137). 2008.Regarding the explanation of organisms as instances of complex design, Kantian philosophy faces a difficult problem: as material entities they should be explained through mechanical laws, but because of their design, they call for an explanation through final causes. Nonetheless, both explanations are unacceptable. Does Kant offer any way out? Part of his solution is that both teleology and mechanicism must apply as regulative principles. But this implies limiting mechanicism to a regulative ide…Read more
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30The Evolution of Contractual MoralityIdeas Y Valores 60 (147). 2011.Evolutionary explanations of altruism and human cooperation, first set forth by pioneers such as Darwin, Hamilton and Trivers, suggest that biology might be capable of offering a plausible scientific explanation of the core of human morality. According to this project, morality and human cooperation arise when resourcesare scarce; they cannot be exploited by isolated individuals; and individuals cannot maintain a long-term position of domination over others in order to advance their selfish ends…Read more
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84El conflicto entre lo racional y lo irracional en los fundamentos de la filosofía de la historia según KantAreté. Revista de Filosofía 2 (2): 261-279. 1990.La filosofía se ha preocupado desde susorígenes por el sentido de la vida humana. Estapreocupación es la que subyace a la "Filosofíade la Historia", disciplina que surge en laépoca moderna con la pregunta por la existencia o inexistencia de un progreso en la historia. Autores como Kant consideran que el progreso,para poder valer como tal, ha de aconteceren el terreno de lo moral, sobre todo en sus manifestaciones sociales externas, es decir, enla realización del derecho natural en las formasconc…Read more
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60Beyond Inclusive Fitness? On A Simple And General Explanation For The Evolution of AltruismPhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 2 (20130604). 2010.Altruism is a central concept in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biologists still disagree about its meaning (E.O. Wilson 2005; Fletcher et al. 2006; D.S. Wilson 2008; Foster et al. 2006a, b; West et al. 2007a, 2008). Semantic disagreement appears to be quite robust and not easily overcome by attempts at clarification, suggesting that substantive conceptual issues lurk in the background. Briefly, group selection theorists define altruism as any trait that makes altruists losers to selfish tra…Read more
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163Multilevel selection and human altruismBiology and Philosophy 23 (2): 205-215. 2008.Views on the evolution of altruism based upon multilevel selection on structured populations pay little attention to the difference between fortuitous and deliberate processes leading to assortative grouping. Altruism may evolve when assortative grouping is fortuitously produced by forces external to the organism. But when it is deliberately produced by the same proximate mechanism that controls altruistic responses, as in humans, exploitation of altruists by selfish individuals is unlikely and …Read more
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40Las emociones morales como adaptaciones para la cooperación en dilemas socialesLudus Vitalis 15 (28): 97-118. 2007.
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11William A., Rottschaefer. The biology and psychology of moral agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998.293 p. isbn 0-521-59265-8 (review)Ideas Y Valores 49 (113). 2000.
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37Selección natural Y moralidadIdeas Y Valores 55 (132): 53-73. 2006.Resumen: En este ensayo abordo los intentos, relativamente recientes, de dar una explicación de la moralidad como adaptación por selección natural. Mi exposición tiene una introducción y cuatro partes: en la primera explico en qué consiste la paradoja del altruismo biológico. En la segunda expongo l..
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16A cooperative species: human reciprocity and its evolutionRevista de Filosofia Aurora 25 (36): 343. 2013.
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40Levels of Selection in SynergyTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 135-150. 2009.Individual and group selection are usually conceived as opposed evolutionary processes. Though cases of synergy are occasionally recognized, the evolutionary importance of synergy is largely ignored. However, synergy is the plausible explanation for the evolution of collectives as higher level individuals i.e., collectives acting as adaptive units, e.g., genomes and colonies of social insects. It rests on the suppression of the predictable tendency of evolutionary units to benefit at the expense…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |