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4332The Ship of Theseus PuzzleIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 158-174. 2014.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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2258Nothing 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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852Fuller and the Folk: The Inner Morality of Law RevisitedIn Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 6-28. 2020.The experimental turn in philosophy has reached several sub-fields including ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This paper is among the first to apply experimental techniques to questions in the philosophy of law. Specifically, we examine Lon Fuller's procedural natural law theory. Fuller famously claimed that legal systems necessarily observe eight principles he called "the inner morality of law." We evaluate Fuller's claim by surveying both ordinary people and legal experts about their int…Read more
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778Trolleys, 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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702The 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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678Are 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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668Trolleys, Triage and Covid-19: The Role of Psychological Realism in Sacrificial DilemmasCognition and Emotion 8. 2021.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 triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitar…Read more
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608Experimental 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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557Purposes 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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390Governance 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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348De 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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343Estimating 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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259The 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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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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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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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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173Self-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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149Might-counterfactuals and the principle of conditional excluded middleDisputatio 4 (30): 127-149. 2011.Owing to the problem of inescapable clashes, epistemic accounts of might-counterfactuals have recently gained traction. In a different vein, the might argument against conditional excluded middle has rendered the latter a contentious principle to incorporate into a logic for conditionals. The aim of this paper is to rescue both ontic mightcounterfactuals and conditional excluded middle from these disparate debates and show them to be compatible. I argue that the antecedent of a might-counte…Read more
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136The Folk Concept of Law: Law Is Intrinsically MoralAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1): 165-179. 2022.ABSTRACT Most theorists agree that our social order includes a distinctive legal dimension. A fundamental question is that of whether reference to specific legal phenomena always involves a commitment to a particular moral view. Whereas many philosophers advance the ‘positivist’ claim that any correspondence between morality and the law is just a function of political circumstance, natural law theorists insist that law is intrinsically moral. Each school claims the crucial advantage of consisten…Read more
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122Experimental 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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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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109Behavioral 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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86How 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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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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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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75Legal decision-making and the abstract/concrete paradoxCognition 205 (C): 104421. 2020.Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the s…Read more
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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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68Intencionalidad 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
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65Advancing 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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65Act Versus Impact: Conservatives and Liberals Exhibit Different Structural Emphases in Moral JudgmentRatio 30 (4): 462-493. 2017.Conservatives and liberals disagree sharply on matters of morality and public policy. We propose a novel account of the psychological basis of these differences. Specifically, we find that conservatives tend to emphasize the intrinsic value of actions during moral judgment, in part by mentally simulating themselves performing those actions, while liberals instead emphasize the value of the expected outcomes of the action. We then demonstrate that a structural emphasis on actions is linked to the…Read more
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |