Eindhoven University of Technology
Department of Philosophy and Ethics
PhD, 2022
  •  35
    Having a Sense of Humor as a Virtue
    with Mark Alfano and Paula Urbanowicz
    Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (4): 659-680. 2024.
  •  7
    Toward an understanding of collective intellectual humility
    with Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso, Philip Pärnamets, Steven Bland, Aleksandra Cichocka, Jeroen de Ridder, Hugo Mercier, Marco Meyer, Cailin O'Connor, Tenelle Porter, Alessandra Tanesini, Mark Alfano, and Jay Van Bavel
    The study of intellectual humility (IH), which is gaining increasing interest among cognitive scientists, has been dominated by a focus on individuals. We propose that IH operates at the collective level as the tendency of a collective’s members to attend to each other’s intellectual limitations and the limitations of their collective cognitive efforts. Given people’s propensity to better recognize others’ limitations than their own, IH may be more readily achievable in collectives than individu…Read more
  •  36
    Mandevillian vices
    with Steven Bland and Mark Alfano
    Synthese 204 (1): 1-19. 2024.
    Bernard Mandeville argued that traits that have traditionally been seen as detrimental or reprehensible, such as greed, ambition, vanity, and the willingness to deceive, can produce significant social goods. He went so far as to suggest that a society composed of individuals who embody these vices would, under certain constraints, be better off than one composed only of those who embody the virtues of self-restraint. In the twentieth century, Mandeville’s insights were taken up in economics by J…Read more
  •  15
    Correction: Community Heroes and Sleeping Members: Interdependency of the Tenets of Energy Justice
    with Erik Laes, Gunter Bombaerts, Bozena Ryszawska, Magdalena Rozwadowska, Piotr Szymanski, Anja Ruess, Sophie Nyborg, and Meiken Hansen
    Science and Engineering Ethics 28 (6): 1-2. 2022.
  •  60
    Collective Responsibility Should be Treated as a Virtue
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92 27-44. 2022.
    We often praise and blame groups of people like companies or governments, just like we praise and blame individual persons. This makes sense. Because some of the most important problems in our society, like climate change or mass surveillance, are not caused by individual people, but by groups. Philosophers have argued that there exists such a thing as group responsibility, which does not boil down to individual responsibility. This type of responsibility can only exist in groups that are organi…Read more
  •  1
    Do Collective Epistemic Virtues have to be Scaled-Up Individual Virtues?
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. 2021.
    Can groups of people possess epistemic virtues? There has been some attention to this question in recent years in social epistemology and ethics. Interestingly, most defenses and criticisms of collective virtues so far have focused on proving or disproving that groups can have collective versions of individual virtues. Trying to or disprove that a group can have a good motivation that supervenes motivations of individuals, for example, is a typical strategy. But maybe group virtues are a complet…Read more
  •  74
    Mandevillian Virtues
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1). 2021.
    Studies in collective intelligence have shown that suboptimal cognitive traits of individuals can lead a group to succeed in a collective cognitive task, in recent literature this is called mandevillian intelligence. Analogically, as Mandeville has suggested, the moral vices of individuals can sometimes also lead to collective good. I suggest that this mandevillian morality can happen in many ways in collaborative activities. Mandevillian morality presents a challenge for normative virtue theori…Read more
  •  28
    Community Heroes and Sleeping Members: Interdependency of the Tenets of Energy Justice
    with Erik Laes, Gunter Bombaerts, Bozena Ryszawska, Magdalena Rozwadowska, Piotr Szymanski, Anja Ruess, Sophie Nyborg, and Meiken Hansen
    Science and Engineering Ethics 28 (5): 1-17. 2022.
    Energy justice literature generally treats its three tenets, distributional justice, procedural justice and recognition justice, as separate and independent issues. These are seen as separate dimensions by which criteria can be formulated for a just state of affairs. And a just state of affairs regarding energy should fulfill all criteria. However, we show, using empirical research on six European energy communities that the tenets of energy justice are interdependent and negotiated in practice.…Read more
  •  565
    Having a Sense of Humor as a Virtue
    with Mark Alfano and Paula Urbanowicz
    Journal of Value Inquiry 1-22. 2022.
    Could having a sense of humor be a virtue? In this paper, we argue for an affirmative answer to this question. Like other virtues, a sense of humor enhances and inhibits the expression of various emotions, especially amusement, contempt, trust, and hope. Someone possesses a virtuous sense of humor to the extent that they are well-disposed to appropriately enhance or inhibit these emotions in themselves and others through both embodied reactions (e.g., smiling, laughter, eyerolls) and language (e…Read more
  •  42
    Can Creativity Be a Collective Virtue? Insights for the Ethics of Innovation
    with Gunter Bombaerts, Andreas Spahn, and Lambèr Royakkers
    Journal of Business Ethics 179 (3): 907-918. 2022.
    Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these c…Read more