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13Autonomous agency and the threat of social psychologyIn M. Marraffa, M. Caro & F. Ferretti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection, Springer. 2007.This chapter discusses how research in situationist social psychology may pose largely undiscussed threats to autonomous agency, free will, and moral responsibility
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22Is incompatibilism intuitive?In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 28-53. 2008.Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. W…Read more
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10A painful message: Testing the effects of suffering and understanding on punishment judgmentsZeitschrift Für Psychologie 230 (2): 138-151. 2022.This preregistered experiment examined two proximate drivers of retributive punishment attitudes: the motivation to make the perpetrator suffer, and understand the wrongfulness of his offense. In a sample of 514 US adults, we presented criminal case summaries that varied the level of suffering (absent vs. present) and understanding (absent vs. present) experienced by the perpetrator and measured punishment judgments and attitudes. Our results demonstrate, as predicted, that participants were mor…Read more
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85The Experience of Free WillIn Joe Campbell, Kristin Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Free Will, Blackwell. pp. 417-433. forthcoming.The main question that we address in this chapter is what to say about reportedly libertarian experiences of free agency – in other words, experiences of options as being open, and up to oneself to decide among, such that, if they are accurate or veridical, then (at a minimum) indeterminism must be true. A great deal rides on this question. If normal experiences of free agency are libertarian, and if compatibilists cannot explain them away, then all of us may be under systematic illusion at almo…Read more
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8Punishment as a Scarce Resource: A Potential Policy Intervention for Managing Incarceration RatesFrontiers in Psychology 4 (May). 2023.Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges justify incarceration decisions with respect to their operational costs (e.g., prison capacity). In an Internet-based vignette experiment (N = 214), we tested this prediction by examining whether criminal punishment judgments (prison vs. probation) among university undergraduates would be influenced by a prompt to provide a justification for one's judgment, and by a brief message describing prison capac…Read more
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22Attributions toward Artificial Agents in a modified Moral Turing TestScientific Reports 14 (8458): 1-11. 2024.Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) raise important questions about whether people view moral evaluations by AI systems similarly to human-generated moral evaluations. We conducted a modified Moral Turing Test (m-MTT), inspired by Allen et al. (Exp Theor Artif Intell 352:24–28, 2004) proposal, by asking people to distinguish real human moral evaluations from those made by a popular advanced AI language model: GPT-4. A representative sample of 299 U.S. adults first rated the quality of moral…Read more
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18The natural method: essays on mind, ethics, and self in honor of Owen Flanagan (edited book)The MIT Press. 2020.This collection offers cutting-edge chapters on themes related to the philosophical work of Owen Flanagan. Flanagan is an influential philosopher in the late 20th and early 21st Century, whose wide-ranging work spans philosophy of mind (especially consciousness, identity, and the self), ethics and moral psychology, comparative philosophy, and philosophical study of psychopathology (especially disorders of self, dreams, and addiction). Flanagan is the author of numerous scholarly and popular arti…Read more
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634Why the manipulation argument fails: determinism does not entail perfect predictionPhilosophical Studies 180 (2): 451-471. 2022.Determinism is frequently understood as implying the possibility of perfect prediction. This possibility then functions as an assumption in the Manipulation Argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Yet this assumption is mistaken. As a result, arguments that rely on it fail to show that determinism would rule out human free will. We explain why determinism does not imply the possibility of perfect prediction in any world with laws of nature like ours, since it would be impo…Read more
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108Temperament and intuition: A commentary on Feltz and CokelyConsciousness and Cognition 18 (1): 351-355. 2009.In this paper, we examine Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely’s recent claim that “the personality trait extraversion predicts people’s intuitions about the relationship of determinism to free will and moral responsibility”. We will first present some criticisms of their work before briefly examining the results of a recent study of our own. We argue that while Feltz and Cokely have their finger on the pulse of an interesting and important issue, they have not established a robust and stable connection…Read more
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327Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: Experiments on folk intuitionsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1). 2007.In this paper we discuss studies that show that most people do not find determinism to be incompatible with free will and moral responsibility if determinism is described in a way that does not suggest mechanistic reductionism. However, if determinism is described in a way that suggests reductionism, that leads people to interpret it as threatening to free will and responsibility. We discuss the implications of these results for the philosophical debates about free will, moral responsibility, …Read more
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1639The phenomenology of free willJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8): 162-179. 2004.Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psycho…Read more
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46The Mind, the Brain, and the LawIn Thomas A. Nadelhoffer (ed.), The Future of Punishment, Oxford University Press Usa. 2013.
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1959The past and future of experimental philosophyPhilosophical Explorations 10 (2). 2007.Experimental philosophy is the name for a recent movement whose participants use the methods of experimental psychology to probe the way people think about philosophical issues and then examine how the results of such studies bear on traditional philosophical debates. Given both the breadth of the research being carried out by experimental philosophers and the controversial nature of some of their central methodological assumptions, it is of no surprise that their work has recently come under at…Read more
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289Polling as PedagogyTeaching Philosophy 31 (1): 39-58. 2008.First, we briefly familiarize the reader with the emerging field of “experimental philosophy,” in which philosophers use empirical methods, rather than armchair speculation, to ascertain laypersons’ intuitions about philosophical issues. Second, we discuss how the surveys used by experimental philosophers can serve as valuable pedagogical tools for teaching philosophy—independently of whether one believes surveying laypersons is an illuminating approach to doing philosophy. Giving students surve…Read more
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1318When Do Robots Have Free Will? Exploring the Relationships between (Attributions of) Consciousness and Free WillIn Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal & Andrew Cameron Sims (eds.), Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience, Brill. 2019.While philosophers and scientists sometimes suggest (or take for granted) that consciousness is an essential condition for free will and moral responsibility, there is surprisingly little discussion of why consciousness (and what sorts of conscious experience) is important. We discuss some of the proposals that have been offered. We then discuss our studies using descriptions of humanoid robots to explore people’s attributions of free will and responsibility, of various kinds of conscious sensat…Read more
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1701Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1): 28-53. 2007.Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. W…Read more
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6489The free will inventory: Measuring beliefs about agency and responsibilityConsciousness and Cognition 25 27-41. 2014.In this paper, we present the results of the construction and validation of a new psychometric tool for measuring beliefs about free will and related concepts: The Free Will Inventory (FWI). In its final form, FWI is a 29-item instrument with two parts. Part 1 consists of three 5-item subscales designed to measure strength of belief in free will, determinism, and dualism. Part 2 consists of a series of fourteen statements designed to further explore the complex network of people’s associated bel…Read more
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211Defeating Manipulation Arguments: Interventionist causation and compatibilist sourcehoodPhilosophical Studies 174 (5): 1255-1276. 2017.We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her a…Read more
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186Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2010._Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings_ is the first book to bring together the most significant contemporary and historical works on the topic from both philosophy and psychology. Provides a comprehensive introduction to moral psychology, which is the study of psychological mechanisms and processes underlying ethics and morality Unique in bringing together contemporary texts by philosophers, psychologists and other cognitive scientists with foundational works from both philosop…Read more
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Free Will and the Knowledge ConditionDissertation, Duke University. 2001.In this dissertation I argue that free will is constituted by a set of cognitive abilities and that free will is threatened not by determinism but perhaps by certain empirical theories. In Chapter 1, I argue that the question of free will should not be focused on the compatibility question. Rather, we should take a position which rejects that either deterministic or indeterministic causation is necessary for free will. Indeterminism does not necessarily threaten free will, and most of the threat…Read more
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1154Verbal reports on the contents of consciousness: Reconsidering introspectionist methodologyPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.Doctors must now take a fifth vital sign from their patients: pain reports. I use this as a case study to discuss how different schools of psychology (introspectionism, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) have treated verbal reports about the contents of consciousness. After examining these differences, I suggest that, with new methods of mapping data about neurobiological states with behavioral data and with verbal reports about conscious experience, we should reconsider some of the introspectio…Read more
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916Free Will and ResponsibilityWIREs Cognitive Science 3 (4): 439-449. 2012.Free will is a set of capacities for conscious choice and control of actions and is essential for moral responsibility. While determinism is traditionally discussed as the main potential challenge to free will and responsibility, other potential challenges exist and need to be considered by philosophers and scientists. The cognitive sciences are relevant to free will both to study how people understand free will and potential challenges to it, and to study whether these challenges are supported …Read more
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364Darwin's continuum and the building blocks of deceptionIn Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen & Gordon M. Burghardt (eds.), The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, Mit Press. pp. 353. 2002.
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8399Is Free Will an Illusion? Confronting Challenges from the Modern Mind SciencesIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: Freedom and Responsibility, Mit Press. 2014.In this chapter I consider various potential challenges to free will from the modern mind sciences. After motivating the importance of considering these challenges, I outline the argument structure for such challenges: they require simultaneously establishing a particular condition for free will and an empirical challenge to that condition. I consider several potential challenges: determinism, naturalism, and epiphenomenalism, and explain why none of these philosophical challenges is bolstered…Read more
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284Why Do Women Leave Philosophy? Surveying Students at the Introductory LevelPhilosophers' Imprint 16. 2016.Although recent research suggests that women are underrepresented in philosophy after initial philosophy courses, there have been relatively few empirical investigations into the factors that lead to this early drop-off in women’s representation. In this paper, we present the results of empirical investigations at a large American public university that explore various factors contributing to women’s underrepresentation in philosophy at the undergraduate level. We administered climate surveys to…Read more
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35Review of Joseph Keim Campbell (ed.), Michael O'Rourke (ed.), David Shier (ed.), Freedom and Determinism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (6). 2005.
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716Close calls and the confident agent: Free will, deliberation, and alternative possibilitiesPhilosophical Studies 131 (3): 627-667. 2006.Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible to act in some other way. I…Read more
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1277A Naturalistic Vision of Free WillIn Edouard Machery & Elizabeth O'Neill (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, Routledge. 2014.We argue, contra Joshua Knobe in a companion chapter, that most people have an understanding of free will and responsible agency that is compatible with a naturalistic vision of the human mind. Our argument is supported by results from a new experimental philosophy study showing that most people think free will is consistent with complete and perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on prior activity in the brain (a scenario adapted from Sam Harris who predicts most people will find it…Read more
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2327When consciousness matters: A critical review of Daniel Wegner's the illusion of conscious will (review)Philosophical Psychology 15 (4): 527-541. 2002.In The illusion of conscious will , Daniel Wegner offers an exciting, informative, and potentially threatening treatise on the psychology of action. I offer several interpretations of the thesis that conscious will is an illusion. The one Wegner seems to suggest is "modular epiphenomenalism": conscious experience of will is produced by a brain system distinct from the system that produces action; it interprets our behavior but does not, as it seems to us, cause it. I argue that the evidence Wegn…Read more
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Georgia State UniversityAssistant Professor
Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |