•  2
    The Original Position
    In Helen De Cruz (ed.), Philosophy Illustrated, Oxford University Press. 2021.
  •  12
    Doing Masculinity Better
    In David Baggett & Marybeth Baggett (eds.), Ted Lasso and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 96-104. 2023.
    This chapter explores the hidden depths beneath the vibrant veneer of AppleTV's breakout, award-winning sitcom – Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso depicts several flavors of toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is the wrong path, clearly a moral vice. It encourages harmful behavior, such as sexual assault and domestic violence. Toxic masculinity has also been found to harm men, increasing rates of depression, stress, and substance abuse, as well as alcoholism, cancer, and sexually transmitted infections. In …Read more
  •  217
    According to the standard interpretation of Einstein’s field equations, gravity consists of mass-energy curving spacetime, and an additional physical force or entity—denoted by Λ (the ‘cosmological constant’)—is responsible for the Universe’s metric-expansion. Although General Relativity’s direct predictions have been systematically confirmed, the dominant cosmological model thought to follow from it—the ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) model of the Universe’s history and composition—faces conside…Read more
  •  642
    Varieties of Artificial Moral Agency and the New Control Problem
    Humana.Mente - Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (42): 225-256. 2022.
    This paper presents a new trilemma with respect to resolving the control and alignment problems in machine ethics. Section 1 outlines three possible types of artificial moral agents (AMAs): (1) 'Inhuman AMAs' programmed to learn or execute moral rules or principles without understanding them in anything like the way that we do; (2) 'Better-Human AMAs' programmed to learn, execute, and understand moral rules or principles somewhat like we do, but correcting for various sources of human moral erro…Read more
  •  122
    (When) Are Authors Culpable for Causing Harm?
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (1-2): 47-78. 2023.
    To what extent are authors morally culpable for harms caused by their published work? Can authors be culpable even if their ideas are misused, perhaps because they failed to take precautions to prevent harmful misinterpretations? Might authors be culpable even if they do take precautions—if, for example, they publish ideas that others can be reasonably expected to put to harmful uses, precautions notwithstanding? Although complete answers to these questions depend upon controversial views about …Read more
  •  849
    Allies Against Oppression: Intersectional Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Rawlsian Liberalism
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (2): 221-266. 2023.
    Liberalism is often claimed to be at odds with feminism and critical race theory (CRT). This article argues, to the contrary, that Rawlsian liberalism supports the central commitments of both. Section 1 argues that Rawlsian liberalism supports intersectional feminism. Section 2 argues that the same is true of CRT. Section 3 then uses Young’s ‘Five Faces of Oppression’—a classic work widely utilized in feminism and CRT to understand and contest many varieties of oppression—to illustrate how Rawls…Read more
  •  936
    Alex Byrne contends that women are (simply) adult human females, claiming that this thesis has considerably greater initial appeal than the justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge. This paper refutes Byrne’s thesis in the same way the JTB theory of knowledge is widely thought to have been refuted: through simple counterexamples. Lessons are drawn. One lesson is that women need not be human. A second lesson is that biology and physical phenotypes are both irrelevant to whether someone is …Read more
  •  548
    Educational Justice and School Boosting
    Social Theory and Practice 50 (1): 1-31. 2024.
    School boosters are tax-exempt organizations that engage in fundraising efforts to provide public schools with supplementary resources. This paper argues that prevailing forms of school boosting are defeasibly unjust. Section 1 shows that inequalities in public education funding in the United States violate John Rawls’s two principles of domestic justice. Section 2 argues that prevailing forms of school boosting exacerbate and plausibly perpetuate these injustices. Section 3 then contends that b…Read more
  •  796
    Panpsychism and AI consciousness
    Synthese 200 (3): 1-22. 2022.
    This article argues that if panpsychism is true, then there are grounds for thinking that digitally-based artificial intelligence may be incapable of having coherent macrophenomenal conscious experiences. Section 1 briefly surveys research indicating that neural function and phenomenal consciousness may be both analog in nature. We show that physical and phenomenal magnitudes—such as rates of neural firing and the phenomenally experienced loudness of sounds—appear to covary monotonically with th…Read more
  •  290
    Michael Huemer argues that cross-cultural convergence toward liberal moral values is evidence of objective moral progress, and by extension, evidence for moral realism. Nathan Cofnas claims to debunk Huemer’s argument by contending that convergence toward liberal moral values can be better explained by ‘two related non-truth-tracking processes’: self-interest and its long-term tendency to result in social conditions conducive to greater empathy. This article argues that although Cofnas successfu…Read more
  •  128
    Due to a production error, two block-quotations were originally omitted from the final publication. These passages have been corrected in the web-version on the journal’s website (DOI: 10.1111/phil.12282), but cannot be corrected in the print/PDF version. Readers of the PDF version, please note the two corrections herein.
  •  1039
    Two New Doubts about Simulation Arguments
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3): 496-508. 2022.
    Various theorists contend that we may live in a computer simulation. David Chalmers in turn argues that the simulation hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of our reality, rather than a sceptical scenario. We use recent work on consciousness to motivate new doubts about both sets of arguments. First, we argue that if either panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then the only way to live in a simulation may be as brains-in-vats, in which case it is unlikely that we live in a s…Read more
  •  356
    Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation
    In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics, Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109. 2021.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual ration…Read more
  •  402
    The Normative Stance
    Philosophical Forum 52 (1): 79-89. 2021.
    The Duhem-Quine thesis famously holds that a single hypothesis cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation, but instead only in conjunction with other background hypotheses. This article argues that this has important and underappreciated implications for metaethics. Section 1 argues that if one begins metaethics firmly wedded to a naturalistic worldview—due (e.g.) to methodological/epistemic considerations—then normativity will appear to be reducible to a set of social-psycho-semantic beha…Read more
  •  319
    Chapter 1 of this book argued that moral philosophy should be based on seven principles of theory selection adapted from the sciences. Chapter 2 argued that these principles support basing normative moral philosophy on a particular problem of diachronic instrumental rationality: the ‘problem of possible future selves.’ Chapter 3 argued that a new moral principle, the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative, is the rational solution to this problem. Chapter 4 argued that the Categorical-Instrumental …Read more
  •  332
    This chapter derives and refines a novel normative moral theory and descriptive theory of moral psychology--Rightness as Fairness--from the theory of prudence defended in Chapter 2. It briefly summarizes Chapter 2’s finding that prudent agents typically internalize ‘moral risk-aversion’. It then outlines how this prudential psychology leads prudent agents to want to know how to act in ways they will not regret in morally salient cases, as well as to regard moral actions as the only types of acti…Read more
  •  297
    This book outlines a unified theory of prudence and morality that merges a wide variety of findings in behavioral neuroscience with philosophically sophisticated normative theorizing. Chapter 1 lays out the emerging behavioral neuroscience of prudence and morality. Chapter 2 then outlines a new theory of prudence as fairness to oneself across time. Chapter 3 then derives a revised version of my 2016 moral theory--Rightness as Fairness--from this theory of prudence, showing how the theory of prud…Read more
  •  58
  •  409
    Jury Theorems for Peer Review
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where papers are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this paper we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting papers by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will…Read more
  •  81
    Why Does Inequality Matter? (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4): 845-846. 2019.
    Volume 97, Issue 4, December 2019, Page 845-846.
  •  1475
    David. J. Chalmers examines eleven possible solutions to the meta-problem of consciousness, ‘the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness.’ The present paper argues that Chalmers overlooks an explanation that he has otherwise taken seriously, and which a number of philosophers, physicists, and computer scientists have taken seriously as well: the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation. This paper argues that a particular version of the simulatio…Read more
  •  1085
    The Dark Side of Morality: Group Polarization and Moral Epistemology
    Philosophical Forum 50 (1): 87-115. 2019.
    This article argues that philosophers and laypeople commonly conceptualize moral truths or justified moral beliefs as discoverable through intuition, argument, or some other purely cognitive or affective process. It then contends that three empirically well-supported theories all predict that this ‘Discovery Model’ of morality plays a substantial role in causing social polarization. The same three theories are then used to argue that an alternative ‘Negotiation Model’ of morality—according to wh…Read more
  •  814
    Nonideal Justice as Nonideal Fairness
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (2): 208-228. 2019.
    This article argues that diverse theorists have reasons to theorize about fairness in nonideal conditions, including theorists who reject fairness in ideal theory. It then develops a new all-purpose model of ‘nonideal fairness.’ §1 argues that fairness is central to nonideal theory across diverse ideological and methodological frameworks. §2 then argues that ‘nonideal fairness’ is best modeled by a nonideal original position adaptable to different nonideal conditions and background normative fra…Read more
  •  33
    What Can Philosophy Contribute to Ethics?, written by James Griffin (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (5): 622-625. 2018.
  •  838
    Mental time-travel, semantic flexibility, and A.I. ethics
    AI and Society 38 (6): 2577-2596. 2023.
    This article argues that existing approaches to programming ethical AI fail to resolve a serious moral-semantic trilemma, generating interpretations of ethical requirements that are either too semantically strict, too semantically flexible, or overly unpredictable. This paper then illustrates the trilemma utilizing a recently proposed ‘general ethical dilemma analyzer,’ GenEth. Finally, it uses empirical evidence to argue that human beings resolve the semantic trilemma using general cognitive an…Read more
  •  16
    Humans and Hosts in Westworld: What's the Difference?
    In James South & Kimberly Engels (eds.), Westworld and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 26-38. 2018.
    This chapter argues there are many hints in the dialogue, plot, and physics of the first season of Westworld that the events in the show do not take place within a theme park, but rather in a virtual reality (VR) world that people "visit" to escape the "real world." The philosophical implications I draw are several. First, to be simulated is to be real: simulated worlds are every bit as real as "the real world", and simulated people (hosts) are every bit as real as "real" ones. Second, failure t…Read more