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16Does Momentary Outcome‐Based Reflection Shape Bioethical Views? A Pre‐Post Intervention DesignCognitive Science 48 (11). 2024.Many bioliberals endorse broadly consequentialist frameworks in normative ethics, implying that a progressive stance on matters of bioethical controversy could stem from outcome-based reasoning. This raises an intriguing empirical prediction: encouraging outcome-based reflection could yield a shift toward bioliberal views among nonexperts as well. To evaluate this hypothesis, we identified empirical premises that underlie moral disagreements on seven divisive issues (e.g., vaccines, abortion, or…Read more
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65Advance Medical Decision-Making Differs Across First- and Third-Person PerspectivesAJOB Empirical Bioethics 15 (4): 237-245. 2024.Background Advance healthcare decision-making presumes that a prior treatment preference expressed with sufficient mental capacity (“T1 preference”) should trump a contrary preference expressed after significant cognitive decline (“T2 preference”). This assumption is much debated in normative bioethics, but little is known about lay judgments in this domain. This study investigated participants’ judgments about which preference should be followed, and whether these judgments differed depending o…Read more
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202For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across CulturesFrontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and…Read more
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2268Nothing at Stake in KnowledgeNoûs 53 (1): 224-247. 2019.In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some …Read more
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351De 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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228The Gettier Intuition from South America to AsiaJournal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
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11Apply the Laws, if They are Good: Moral Evaluations Linearly Predict Whether Judges Should Enforce the LawCognitive Science 48 (10). 2024.What should judges do when faced with immoral laws? Should they apply them without exception, since “the law is the law?” Or can exceptions be made for grossly immoral laws, such as historically, Nazi law? Surveying laypeople (N = 167) and people with some legal training (N = 141) on these matters, we find a surprisingly strong, monotonic relationship between people's subjective moral evaluation of laws and their judgments that these laws should be applied in concrete cases. This tendency is mos…Read more
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4Moral Attitudes Toward Pharmacologically Assisted Couples Therapy: An Experimental Bioethics Study of Real-World “Love Drugs”American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 15 (4): 239-243. 2024.In a recent study, Lantian and colleagues (2024) measured public attitudes toward the use of ‘love drugs’ as introduced through the work of Earp, Savulescu, and their collaborators. Use of a “revol...
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77Normality and the Treatment-Enhancement DistinctionNeuroethics 16 (2): 1-14. 2023.There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., “enhancement”—for example, us…Read more
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47New 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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33Strong Bipartisan Support for Controlled Psilocybin Use as Treatment or Enhancement in a Representative Sample of US Americans: Need for Caution in Public Policy PersistsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 15 (2): 82-89. 2024.The psychedelic psilocybin has shown promise both as treatment for psychiatric conditions and as a means of improving well-being in healthy individuals. In some jurisdictions (e.g., Oregon, USA), psilocybin use for both purposes is or will soon be allowed and yet, public attitudes toward this shift are understudied. We asked a nationally representative sample of 795 US Americans to evaluate the moral status of psilocybin use in an appropriately licensed setting for either treatment of a psychiat…Read more
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66Advancing 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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239Correction to: Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1): 45-48. 2018.Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
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346Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology (1): 1-36. 2018.Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi stud…Read more
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267The True Self and Decision-Making CapacityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (8): 86-88. 2024.Jennifer Hawkins (2024) offers two cases that challenge traditional accounts of decision-making capacity, according to which respect for a medical decision turns on an individual’s cognitive capacities at the time the decision is made (Hawkins 2024; Appelbaum and Grisso 1988). In each of her described cases (involving anorexia nervosa and grief, respectively), a patient makes a decision that—although instrumentally rational at the time—does not reflect the patient’s longer-term values due to bei…Read more
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123Experimental 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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619Experimental 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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28Moral Attitudes Toward Pharmacologically Assisted Couples Therapy: An Experimental Bioethics Study of Real-World 'Love Drugs'American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience. forthcoming.In a recent study, Lantian and colleagues (2024) measured public attitudestoward the use of ‘love drugs’ as introduced through the work of Earp,Savulescu, and their collaborators. Use of a “revolutionary pill” (described as“100% reliable”) to bring about love is seen as less morally acceptable thanpsychological therapy toward the same end, and this is partly explained byperceptions that the pill-induced love is less authentic. However, the “pill” inquestion bears little resemblance to the real-w…Read more
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18Legal Provisions on Medical Aid in Dying Encode Moral IntuitionPreprint. forthcoming.In recent decades, many jurisdictions have moved toward legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide—together with a growing recognition of the moral right to a medically assisted death. Herewe draw on a comprehensive quantitative review of existing laws on assisted dying, experimental survey evidence, and four decades of time-series data to explore the relationship between these legislative transitions and changing moral attitudes. Our analysis reveals that existing laws on medical aid in dying i…Read more
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181Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual StructureReview of Philosophy and Psychology. forthcoming.Theoretical debates around the concept of self-deception revolve around identifying the conditions for a behavior to qualify as self-deception. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that various candidate features—such as intent, belief change, and motive—are treated as sufficient, but non-necessary, conditions according to the lay concept of self-deception. This led us to ask whether there are multiple lay concepts, such that different participants endorse competing theories (the disagreement view), or …Read more
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18Who Has a Free Speech Problem? Motivated Censorship Across the Ideological DivideIn David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects, Springer Verlag. pp. 215-237. 2023.Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether “canceling” is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and c…Read more
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38Coordination and expertise foster legal textualismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119 (44). 2022.A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a pl…Read more
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26Experimental Philosophical Bioethics, Advance Directives and the True Self in DementiaIn Kristien Hens & Andreas De Block (eds.), Advances in experimental philosophy of medicine, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 259-284. 2023.In the present chapter, we seek to better understand how lay people reason about the “true self” of a person with advancing dementia. We are also interested in how such reasoning bears on laypeople’s views about the validity or invalidity of an advance directive (AD) regarding that person’s treatment. Toward that end, we will report the results of two empirical studies we undertook to gain insights into this relationship: namely, between judgments about the true self and whether to follow an AD.…Read more
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393Governance quality indicators for organ procurement policiesPLoS ONE 16 (6). 2021.Background Consent policies for post-mortem organ procurement (OP) vary throughout Europe, and yet no studies have empirically evaluated the ethical implications of contrasting consent models. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel indicator of governance quality based on the ideal of informed support, and examine national differences on this measure through a quantitative survey of OP policy informedness and preferences in seven European countries. Methods Between 2017–2019, we conducted a conv…Read more
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109Is utilitarian sacrifice becoming more morally permissible?Cognition 170 (C): 95-101. 2018.A central tenet of contemporary moral psychology is that people typically reject active forms of utilitarian sacrifice. Yet, evidence for secularization and declining empathic concern in recent decades suggests the possibility of systematic change in this attitude. In the present study, we employ hypothetical dilemmas to investigate whether judgments of utilitarian sacrifice are becoming more permissive over time. In a cross-sectional design, age negatively predicted utilitarian moral judgment (…Read more
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77Absolutely Right and Relatively Good: Consequentialists See Bioethical Disagreement in a Relativist LightAJOB Empirical Bioethics 12 (3): 190-205. 2021.Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (…Read more
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35Examining Public Trust in Categorical versus Comprehensive Triage CriteriaAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (7): 106-109. 2020.Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 106-109.
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72How do people use ‘killing’, ‘letting die’ and related bioethical concepts? Contrasting descriptive and normative hypothesesBioethics 34 (5): 509-518. 2020.Bioethicists involved in end‐of‐life debates routinely distinguish between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. Meanwhile, previous work in cognitive science has revealed that when people characterize behaviour as either actively ‘doing’ or passively ‘allowing’, they do so not purely on descriptive grounds, but also as a function of the behaviour’s perceived morality. In the present report, we extend this line of research by examining how medical students and professionals (N = 184) and laypeople (N = 1…Read more
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Coordination and expertise foster legal textualismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (44). 2022.A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. F…Read more
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44The Brain Death Criterion in Light of Value-Based Disagreement Versus Biomedical UncertaintyAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (1): 123-126. 2024.Since the introduction of a new criterion for determining death (i.e., the brain death criterion) in 1968, the research community has been embroiled in debates about whether this criterion should b...
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |