•  19
    An epistemic trespasser is someone who lacks expertise in a domain yet expresses an opinion about its subject matter based on their own assessment of the evidence. Epistemic trespassing is prima facie problematic, but philosophers have argued that it is appropriate when the trespasser possesses relevant skills and evidence. We argue that this defence is available to epistemic trespassers more often than most philosophers have recognized, but it does not vindicate trespassing. The justified tresp…Read more
  • Of marshmallows and moderation
    Moral Psychology 5. 2017.
  •  68
    Believing in Shmeliefs
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (n/a). 2024.
    People report believing weird things: that the Earth is flat, that senior Democrats are subjecting kidnapped children to abuse, and so on. How can people possibly believe things like this? Some philosophers have recently argued for a surprising answer: people don’t believe these things at all. Rather, they mistake their imaginings for beliefs. They are shmelievers, not believers. In this paper, I consider the prospects for this kind of explanation. I argue that some belief reports are simply ins…Read more
  •  51
    The Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelics Ethics (HOPE) Working Group Consensus Statement
    with Edward Jacobs, Brian D. Earp, Paul S. Appelbaum, Lori Bruce, Ksenia Cassidy, Yuria Celidwen, Katherine Cheung, Sean K. Clancy, Neşe Devenot, Jules Evans, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Phoebe Friesen, Albert Garcia Romeu, Neil Gehani, Molly Maloof, Olivia Marcus, Ole Martin Moen, Mayli Mertens, Sandeep M. Nayak, Tehseen Noorani, Kyle Patch, Sebastian Porsdam-Mann, Gokul Raj, Khaleel Rajwani, Keisha Ray, William Smith, Daniel Villiger, Roger Crisp, Julian Savulescu, Ilina Singh, and David B. Yaden
    American Journal of Bioethics 24 (7): 6-12. 2024.
    Volume 24, Issue 7, July 2024, Page 6-12.
  •  100
    Consciousness Ain’t All That
    Neuroethics 17 (2): 1-14. 2024.
    Most philosophers think that phenomenal consciousness underlies, or at any rate makes a large contribution, to moral considerability. This paper argues that many such accounts invoke question-begging arguments. Moreover, they’re unable to explain apparent differences in moral status across and within different species. In the light of these problems, I argue that we ought to take very seriously a view according to which moral considerability is grounded in functional properties. Phenomenal consc…Read more
  •  74
    Non-Ideal Epistemology and Vices of Attention
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 32 (1): 124-131. 2024.
    McKenna’s critique (rather than criticisms) of idealized approaches to epistemology is an important contribution to the literature. In this brief discussion, I set out his main concerns about more idealized approaches, within and beyond social epistemology, before turning to some issues I think he neglects. I suggest that it’s important to pay attention to the prestige hierarchy in philosophy, and to how that hierarchy can serve ideological purposes. The greater prestige of more abstract approac…Read more
  •  3
    Introduction: Responsibility and Healthcare, An Overview
    In Ben Davies, Gabriel De Marco, Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Responsibility and Healthcare, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 1-32. 2024.
    This introductory chapter offers an overview of the various ways that responsibility may be relevant to health care, in order to situate the chapters in this volume in their broader context. The chapter begins by outlining relevant concepts, and explaining why it is worth considering the role of responsibility in health care. The chapter then turns to various ways in which patients might be held responsible in a health care system, before considering objections to these practices. Finally, the c…Read more
  •  5
    Responsibility for ill-health and lifestyle: Drilling down into the details
    In Ben Davies, Gabriel De Marco, Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Responsibility and Healthcare, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 167-183. 2024.
    Whether agents are morally responsible for their need for scarce resources is a difficult and fraught issue. In this chapter, I aim to explore some unappreciated difficulties for the attribution of moral responsibility for needs that arise from the fact that in typical cases, ill-health arises from lifestyle: not, that is, from one bad decision, but from a long-term pattern of actions. First, I hope to build on Brown and Savulescu’s (2019) programmatic exploration of what they call the diachroni…Read more
  •  45
    Too humble for words
    Philosophical Studies 180 (10): 3141-3160. 2023.
    It’s widely held that a lack of intellectual humility is part of the reason why flagrantly unjustified beliefs proliferate. In this paper, I argue that an excess of humility also plays a role in allowing for the spread of misinformation. Citing experimental evidence, I show that inducing intellectual humility causes people inappropriately to lower their confidence in beliefs that are actually justified for them. In these cases, they manifest epistemic humility in ways that make them epistemicall…Read more
  •  46
    The Myth of Zero-Sum Responsibility: Towards Scaffolded Responsibility for Health
    with Julian Savulescu
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (1-2): 85-105. 2023.
    Some people argue that the distribution of medical resources should be sensitive to agents’ responsibility for their ill-health. In contrast, others point to the social determinants of health to argue that the collective agents that control the conditions in which agents act should bear responsibility. To a large degree, this is a debate in which those who hold individuals responsible currently have the upper hand: warranted appeals to individual responsibility effectively block allocation of an…Read more
  •  321
    Do We Still Need Experts?
    In Andrea Lavazza & Mirko Farina (eds.), Overcoming the Myth of Neutrality: Expertise for a New World., Routledge. forthcoming.
    In the wake of the spectacular success of Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice, philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when recipients of testimony discount it in virtue of its source: usually, their social identity. The remedy for epistemic injustice is almost always listening better and giving greater weight to the testimony we hear, on most philosophers' implicit or explicit view. But Fricker identifies another kind of epistemi…Read more
  •  177
    Intellectual Virtue Signaling
    American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (3): 311-324. 2023.
    Discussions of virtue signaling to date have focused exclusively on the signaling of the moral virtues. This article focuses on intellectual virtue signaling: the status-seeking advertising of supposed intellectual virtues. Intellectual virtue signaling takes distinctive forms. It is also far more likely to be harmful than moral virtue signaling, because it distracts attention from genuine expertise and gives contrarian opinions an undue prominence in public debate. The article provides a heuris…Read more
  •  8
    Frankfurt in Fake Barn Country
    In Duncan Pritchard & Lee John Whittington (eds.), The Philosophy of Luck, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.
    It is very widely held that Frankfurt‐style cases—in which a counterfactual intervener stands by to bring it about that an agent performs an action but never actually acts because the agent performs that action on her own—show that free will does not require alternative possibilities. This essay argues that that conclusion is unjustified, because merely counterfactual interven‐ers may make a difference to normative properties. It presents a modified version of a fake barn case to show how a coun…Read more
  •  10
    Neuroethics and Responsibility
    In Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.
    Neuroethics has two focuses: ethical issues arising from the sciences of the mind, and the ways in which these same sciences can help us to understand normative questions. In this chapter, I pursue a question in the second kind of neuroethics, exploring how the sciences of the mind help us to understand when agents are responsible for their actions. First, I examine the case of the psychopath, and argue that the relevant data suggests that psychopaths do not act with the kind of quality of will …Read more
  •  7
    Naturalism and Free Will
    In Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.
    Most of the philosophers engaged in the free will debate accept some kind of naturalism constraint. In this chapter, I distinguish three different kinds of naturalism. Strong naturalists hold that philosophical theorizing should be actually guided by current science, whereas weak naturalists avoid postulating any entities or processes that conflict with science (but may take bets on how science will evolve). Mid‐strength naturalism is agnostic about how future science will evolve, but is not act…Read more
  •  33
    Response to commentators
    Philosophical Psychology 36 (4): 846-859. 2023.
    This paper replies to the contributors to a symposium on the book Bad Beliefs. It groups the criticisms and concerns of the contributors under the headings “Gaps and Holes”, “Rationality”, “Epistemic Virtue”, “Agency and Control” and “Nudges”. It defends the view that bad belief formation and maintenance is very importantly rational, though it also acknowledges gaps, limitations and unanswered questions.
  •  59
    It’s Our Epistemic Environment, Not Our Attitude Toward Truth, That Matters
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 35 (1): 94-111. 2023.
    The widespread conviction that we are living in a post-truth era rests on two claims: that a large number of people believe things that are clearly false, and that their believing these things reflects a lack of respect for truth. In reality, however, fewer people believe clearly false things than surveys or social media suggest. In particular, relatively few people believe things that are widely held to be bizarre. Moreover, accepting false beliefs does not reflect a lack of respect for truth. …Read more
  •  125
    Against Intellectual Autonomy: Social Animals Need Social Virtues
    Social Epistemology 38 (3): 350-363. 2024.
    We are constantly called upon to evaluate the evidential weight of testimony, and to balance its deliverances against our own independent thinking. ‘Intellectual autonomy’ is the virtue that is supposed to be displayed by those who engage in cognition in this domain well. I argue that this is at best a misleading label for the virtue, because virtuous cognition in this domain consists in thinking with others, and intelligently responding to testimony. I argue that the existing label supports an …Read more
  •  92
    Self-Control
    Routledge. 2022.
    Self-control is a fundamental part of what it is to be a human being. It poses important philosophical and psychological questions about the nature of belief, motivation, judgment, and decision making. More immediately, failures of self-control can have high costs, resulting in ill-health, loss of relationships, and even violence and death, whereas strong self-control is also often associated with having a virtuous character. What exactly is self-control? If we lose control can we still be free?…Read more
  •  2
    Socializing responsibility
    In Marina Oshana, Katrina Hutchison & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility, Oup Usa. 2018.
  •  1
    Fake news and free speech
    In David Edmonds (ed.), Ethics and the Contemporary World, Routledge. 2019.
  •  53
    After the Pandemic: New Responsibilities
    with Julian Savulescu
    Public Health Ethics 14 (2): 120-133. 2021.
    Seasonal influenza kills many hundreds of thousands of people every year. We argue that the current pandemic has lessons we should learn concerning how we should respond to it. Our response to the COVID-19 not only provides us with tools for confronting influenza; it also changes our sense of what is possible. The recognition of how dramatic policy responses to COVID-19 were and how widespread their general acceptance has been allowed us to imagine new and more sweeping responses to influenza. I…Read more
  •  62
    Framing provides reasons
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.
    Framing effects are held to be irrational because preferences should remain stable across different descriptions of the same state of affairs. Bermúdez offers one reason why this may be false. I argue for another: If framing provides implicit testimony, then rational agents will alter their preferences accordingly. I show there is evidence that framing should be understood as testimonial.
  •  76
    Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    This book challenges the view that bad beliefs - beliefs that blatantly conflict with easily available evidence - can largely be explained by widespread irrationality, instead arguing that ordinary people are rational agents whose beliefs are the result of their rational response to the evidence they're presented with.
  •  76
    Bad beliefs – a precis
    Philosophical Psychology 36 (4): 772-777. 2023.
    This brief paper sketches the main theses of my recent book Bad Beliefs. The book defends the view that human cognition is more evidence responsive than most psychologists and naturalistic philosophers think. In particular, we are responsive to the abundant higher-order evidence that we encounter in experiments and in everyday life.
  •  267
    Do your own research!
    Synthese 200 (5): 1-19. 2022.
    Philosophical tradition and conspiracy theorists converge in suggesting that ordinary people ought to do their own research, rather than accept the word of others. In this paper, I argue that it’s no accident that conspiracy theorists value lay research on expert topics: such research is likely to undermine knowledge, via its effects on truth and justification. Accepting expert testimony is a far more reliable route to truth. Nevertheless, lay research has a range of benefits; in particular, it …Read more
  •  39
    The Cognitive Reflection Test is a widely used measure of the degree to which individuals override an intuitive response and engage in reflection. For both theoretical and practical reasons, it is widely taken to assess an important component of rational thought. In this paper, I will argue that while doing well on the CRT requires valuable cognitive capacities and dispositions, doing badly does not always indicate a lack of such capacities and dispositions. The CRT, I argue, offers respondents …Read more