•  551
    Rationality is Not Coherence
    Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1): 312-332. 2022.
    According to a popular account, rationality is a kind of coherence of an agent’s mental states and, more specifically, a matter of fulfilling norms of coherence. For example, in order to be rational, an agent is required to intend to do what they judge they ought to and can do. This norm has been called ‘Enkrasia’. Another norm requires that, ceteris paribus, an agent retain their intention over time. This has been called ‘Persistence of Intention’. This paper argues that thus understood norms o…Read more
  •  12
    Weakness of will and delay discounting
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Breaking one's dieting rule or resolution to quit smoking, procrastination, convenient lies, even the failure of entire nations to follow through with plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions or keep a pandemic in check - these phenomena have been discussed by philosophers and behavioural scientists as examples of weakness of will and delay discounting. Despite the common subject matter both fields have to date rarely worked together for mutual benefit. For the empirical literature is hardly access…Read more
  •  391
    Extremists are more confident
    with Viet Tran
    Erkenntnis. 2022.
    Metacognitive mental states are mental states about mental states. For example, I may be uncertain whether my belief is correct. In social discourse, an interlocutor’s metacognitive certainty may constitute evidence about the reliability of their testimony. For example, if a speaker is certain that their belief is correct, then we may take this as evidence in favour of their belief, or its content. This paper argues that, if metacognitive certainty is genuine evidence, then it is disproportionat…Read more
  •  235
    Policy regulations of ethically controversial genetic technologies should, on the one hand, be based on ethical principles. On the other hand, they should be socially acceptable to ensure implementation. In addition, they should align with ethical theory. Yet to date we lack a reliable and valid scale to measure the relevant ethical judgements in laypeople. We target this lacuna. We developed a scale based on ethical principles to elicit lay judgments: the Genetic Technologies Questionnaire (GTQ…Read more
  •  390
    Deliberation and confidence change
    Synthese 200 (1): 1-13. 2022.
    We argue that social deliberation may increase an agent’s confidence and credence under certain circumstances. An agent considers a proposition H and assigns a probability to it. However, she is not fully confident that she herself is reliable in this assignment. She then endorses H during deliberation with another person, expecting him to raise serious objections. To her surprise, however, the other person does not raise any objections to H. How should her attitudes toward H change? It seems pl…Read more
  •  648
    Moral discourse boosts confidence in moral judgments
    with Benedikt Höltgen and Viet Tran
    Philosophical Psychology 34. 2021.
    The so-called “conciliatory” norm in epistemology and meta-ethics requires that an agent, upon encountering peer disagreement with her judgment, lower her confidence about that judgment. But whether agents actually abide by this norm is unclear. Although confidence is excessively researched in the empirical sciences, possible effects of disagreement on confidence have been understudied. Here, we target this lacuna, reporting a study that measured confidence about moral beliefs before and after e…Read more
  •  374
    Conflicting Judgments and Weakness of Will
    Philosophia 1 (1): 255-269. 2020.
    This paper shows that our popular account of weakness of will is inconsistent with dilemmas. In dilemmas, agents judge that they ought to do one thing, that they ought to do something else, and that they cannot do both. They must act against either of their two judgments. But such action is commonly understood as weakness of will. An agent is weak-willed in doing something if she judges that she ought to and could do something else instead. Thus, it seems that, in a dilemma, the agent is weak-wi…Read more
  •  176
    Vom Sollen zum Sein
    In Georgios Karageorgoudis and Jörg Noller (ed.), Sein und Sollen, . pp. 199-220. 2021.
    ENGLISH. From statements about what is the case we cannot derive statements about what ought to be. This is only one way in which we can describe the dichotomy between Is and Ought that has preoccupied philosophers since Hume to the present day. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the question of whether statements about what ought to be may commit us to, or even imply, statements about what is. This paper aims to address this shortcoming. It pursues two goals. First, it tries …Read more
  •  456
    Compensation and Moral Luck
    The Monist 104 (2): 251-264. 2021.
    In some vicarious cases of compensation, an agent seems obligated to compensate for a harm they did not inflict. This raises the problem that obligations for compensation may arise out of circumstantial luck. That is, an agent may owe compensation for a harm that was outside their control. Addressing this issue, I identify five conditions for compensation from the literature: causal engagement, proxy, ill-gotten gains, constitution, and affiliation. I argue that only two of them specify genuine …Read more
  •  60
    Weakness of the will
    Dissertation, Cambridge University. 2017.
    How is it conceivable or even psychologically possible that rational agents sometimes appear to act against their own acknowledged self-interest? This issue, commonly known as “weakness of the will”, has contributed to much of our individual and collective failure to address pressing problems even if solutions are well-known and readily available. It has fascinated philosophers since ancient times. Recent advances in psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience have allowed us to approach…Read more
  •  286
    Practical implications of empirically studying moral decision-making
    with Giuseppe Ugazio and Philippe Tobler
    Frontiers in Neuroscience 6 94. 2012.
    This paper considers the practical question of why people do not behave in the way they ought to behave. This question is a practical one, reaching both into the normative and descriptive domains of morality. That is, it concerns moral norms as well as empirical facts. We argue that two main problems usually keep us form acting and judging in a morally decent way: firstly, we make mistakes in moral reasoning. Secondly, even when we know how to act and judge, we still fail to meet the requirement…Read more
  •  246
    Aesthetics and morality judgements share functional neuroarchitecture
    with Susanna Weber and Philippe Tobler
    Cortex 129 484-495. 2020.
    Philosophers have predominantly regarded morality and aesthetics judgments as fundamentally different. However, whether this claim is empirically founded has remained unclear. In a novel task, we measured brain activity of participants judging the aesthetic beauty of artwork or the moral goodness of actions depicted. To control for the content of judgments, participants assessed the age of the artworks and the speed of depicted actions. Univariate analyses revealed whole-brain corrected, content…Read more
  •  5227
    Deontology defended
    Synthese 195 (12). 2018.
    Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene’s argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontologica…Read more