•  683
    Animal rights, animal minds, and human mindreading
    Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2): 84-89. 2006.
    Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of human mindreading can be improved with the help of scientific studies of animal minds. But the scientifi…Read more
  •  120
    The new nativism: a commentary on Gary Marcus’s The birth of the mind (review)
    Biology and Philosophy 21 (4): 559-573. 2006.
    Gary Marcus has written a very interesting book about mental development from a nativist perspective. For the general readership at which the book is largely aimed, it will be interesting because of its many informative examples of the development of cognitive structures and because of its illuminating explanations of ways in which genes can contribute to these developmental processes. However, the book is also interesting from a theoretical point of view. Marcus tries to make nativism compatibl…Read more
  •  138
    Neuromoral theorists are those who claim that a scientific understanding of moral judgment through the methods of psychology, neuroscience and related disciplines can have normative implications and can be used to improve the human ability to make moral judgments. We consider three neuromoral theories: one suggested by Gazzaniga, one put forward by Gigerenzer, and one developed by Greene. By contrasting these theories we reveal some of the fundamental issues that neuromoral theories in general h…Read more
  •  98
    What factors should be taken into account when attributing criminal responsibility to perpetrators of severe crimes? We discuss the Breivik case, and the considerations which led to holding Breivik accountable for his criminal acts. We put some pressure on the view that experiencing certain psychiatric symptoms or receiving a certain psychiatric diagnosis is sufficient to establish criminal insanity. We also argue that the presence of delusional beliefs, often regarded as a key factor in determi…Read more
  •  50
    Libertarian paternalism and health care policy: a deliberative proposal (review)
    with Giuseppe Schiavone, Gabriele De Anna, Vincenzo Rebba, and Giovanni Boniolo
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17 (1): 103-113. 2014.
    Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have been arguing for what they named libertarian paternalism (henceforth LP). Their proposal generated extensive debate as to how and whether LP might lead down a full-blown paternalistic slippery slope. LP has the indubitable merit of having hardwired the best of the empirical psychological and sociological evidence into public and private policy making. It is unclear, though, to what extent the implementation of policies so constructed could enhance the capabi…Read more
  •  17
    Migration and Cooperative Infrastructures
    Philosophy and Technology 32 (3): 425-444. 2019.
    A proper understanding of the moral and political significance of migration requires a focus on global inequalities. More specifically, it requires a focus on those global inequalities that affect people’s ability to participate in the production of economic goods and non-economic goods. We call cooperative infrastructures the complex material and immaterial technologies that allow human beings to cooperate in order to generate human goods. By enabling migrants to access high-quality cooperative…Read more
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  •  19
    Human domestication and the roles of human agency in human evolution
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (2): 1-25. 2020.
    Are humans a domesticated species? How is this issue related to debates on the roles of human agency in human evolution? This article discusses four views on human domestication: Darwin’s view; the view of those who link human domestication to anthropogenic niche construction and, more specifically, to sedentism; the view of those who link human domestication to selection against aggression and the domestication syndrome; and a novel view according to which human domestication can be conceived o…Read more
  •  310
    Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness: A Case Study
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 19 (2): 179-187. 2010.
    Various authors have argued that progress in the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences might threaten the commonsense understanding of how the mind generates behavior, and, as a consequence, it might also threaten the commonsense ways of attributing moral responsibility, if not the very notion of moral responsibility. In the case of actions that result in undesirable outcomes, the commonsense conception—which is reflected in sophisticated ways in the legal conception—tells us that there a…Read more
  •  226
    To what extent do self-deception and delusion overlap? In this paper we argue that both self-deception and delusions can be understood in folk-psychological terms. “Motivated” delusions, just like self-deception, can be described as beliefs driven by personal interests. If self-deception can be understood folk-psychologically because of its motivational component, so can motivated delusions. Non-motivated delusions also fit the folk-psychological notion of belief, since they can be described as …Read more
  •  10
    Norms for emotions: biological functions and representational contents
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (1): 101-121. 2004.
  •  177
    Some authors have argued that the human use of reproductive cloning and genetic engineering should be prohibited because these biotechnologies would undermine the autonomy of the resulting child. In this paper, two versions of this view are discussed. According to the first version, the autonomy of cloned and genetically engineered people would be undermined because knowledge of the method by which these people have been conceived would make them unable to assume full responsibility for their ac…Read more
  •  94
    Norms for emotions: Biological functions and representational contents
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (1): 101-121. 2006.
    Normative standards are often applied to emotions. Are there normative standards that apply to emotions in virtue solely of facts about their nature? I will argue that the answer is no. The psychological, behavioural, and neurological evidence suggests that emotions are representational brain states with various kinds of biological functions. Facts about biological functions are not (and do not by themselves entail) normative facts. Hence, there are no nor- mative standards that apply to emotion…Read more
  • Evolution, Motivation, and Moral Beliefs
    In Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott & Ben Fraser (eds.), Cooperation and its Evolution, Mit Press. 2013.
  •  480
    (2) There is significant cultural variation in the way people reason, categorize, and react to various aspects of the world. A proper understanding of such variation has implications for theories about human nature – and cognitive architecture – and its malleability. In turn, these theories have implications for theories about the status and generalisability of psychological explanations (see Nisbett 2003), for theories about the extent to which social engineering and social reform is possible (s…Read more
  •  49
    Modules and mindreaders
    Biology and Philosophy 16 (3): 377-93. 2001.
    There are many interesting empirical and theoretical issues concerning the evolution of cognition. Despite this, recent books on the topic concentrate on two problems. One is mental modularity. The other is what distinguishes human from non-human minds. While it is easy to understand why people are interested in human uniqueness, it is not clear why modularity is the centre of attention. Fodor (2000) has a nice argument for why people _should_ be interested in modularity
  •  100
    Cultural Evolution
    Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.
    Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the human species changes over time. But this is not enough to show that culture evolves. That depends on the mechanisms of change. In the cultural realm, one can often observe something similar to biology’s ‘descent with modification’: cultural traits are sometimes modified, their modifications …Read more
  •  28
    Review of Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (9). 2005.
  •  18
    Norms for emotions: biological functions and representational contents
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (1): 101-121. 2006.
  •  618
    Cystic fibrosis carrier screening in Veneto (Italy): an ethical analysis (review)
    with Tommaso Bruni, Gabriella Pravettoni, and Giovanni Boniolo
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 15 (3): 321-328. 2012.
    A recent study by Castellani et al. (JAMA 302(23):2573–2579, 2009) describes the population-level effects of the choices of individuals who underwent molecular carrier screening for cystic fibrosis (CF) in Veneto, in the northeastern part of Italy, between 1993 and 2007. We discuss some of the ethical issues raised by the policies and individual choices that are the subject of this study. In particular, (1) we discuss the ethical issues raised by the acquisition of genetic information through an…Read more
  •  630
    Mindreading, mindshaping, and evolution
    Biology and Philosophy 16 (5): 595-626. 2001.
    I present and apply some powerful tools for studying human evolution and the impact of cultural resources on it. The tools in question are a theory of niche construction and a theory about the evolutionary significance of extragenetic (and, in particular, of psychological and social) inheritance. These tools are used to show how culturally transmitted resources can be recruited by development and become generatively entrenched. The case study is constituted by those culturally transmitted items t…Read more
  •  651
    The inheritance of features
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 365-399. 2005.
    Since the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, the standard account of the inheritance of features has been in terms of DNA-copying and DNA-transmission. This theory is just a version of the old theory according to which the inheritance of features is explained by the transfer at conception of some developmentally privileged material from parents to offspring. This paper does the following things: (1) it explains what the inheritance of features is; (2) it explains how the DNA-centr…Read more
  •  554
    Nongenetic selection and nongenetic inheritance
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (1): 35-71. 2004.
    According to the received view of evolution, only genes are inherited. From this view it follows that only genetically-caused phenotypic variation is selectable and, thereby, that all selection is at bottom genetic selection. This paper argues that the received view is wrong. In many species, there are intergenerationally-stable phenotypic differences due to environmental differences. Natural selection can act on these nongenetically-caused phenotypic differences in the same way it acts on genet…Read more