Philip Robbins

Consciousness science appears locked in a stalemate: major theories remain unchanged, empirical tests prove inconclusive, and philosophers embrace positions—from panpsychism to illusionism—that sit uneasily with any scientific framework. We argue this impasse is itself a clue. The persistence of the hard problem suggests the field has been focused on the wrong question. Perhaps there is no missing ingredient; perhaps the problem reveals something about the minds trying to understand it. Cognitive network neuroscience illuminates the mystery. The brain's Task Positive Network (analytic reason) and Default Mode Network (empathic reason) employ incompatible representational formats and actively suppress one another. Phenomenal concepts carry visceral mattering; physical concepts are stripped of it. The act of comprehending an objective theory gets in the way of grasping what experience is like. This same antagonism explains why introspective reports have seemed unreliable: researchers conflated tasks requiring analytic engagement with genuine phenomenological descriptions. The sense that physical accounts leave something out is veridical—but what they leave out is a type of understanding, not an ingredient in nature. The hard problem assumes this gap should close; neuroscience shows why it cannot. Understanding why our cognitive architecture segregates these modes is explanatorily prior to questions about what phenomenal concepts refer to. The field has been chasing an illusion of commensurability. The genuine problem of consciousness is different. Understanding the biological basis of the problem of consciousness illuminates a path for progress: building explanatory bridges between cognitively incommensurable perspectives through triangulation of neural, behavioral, and phenomenological evidence.

The ongoing development of autonomous weapons systems, and the increasing frequency of their deployment on the battlefield, poses a pressing problem for military ethics. Somephilosophers have argued that the deployment of fully autonomous weapons would be unethical because it would generate responsibility gaps, that is, situations in which no agent, human or artificial, is morally responsible for wrongful harms resulting from that deployment. But do laypeople find it plausible that the use of fully autonomous weapons gives rise to such gaps? This paper reports results from two studies (total N = 497) designed to answer this question. In these studies, participants were presented with a hypothetical war crime scenario in which an officer ordered a lethal autonomous robot to attack a village, resulting in the deaths of innocent civilians. Most participants attributed some responsibility for the outcome to the officer commanding the attack, the robot that carried out the attack, and the people who programmed the robot. Results from both studies were consistent with the Path Model of blame, according to which attributions of responsibility are influenced by a variety of contextual factors, such as the extent to which the target is seen as acting intentionally. Attributions of responsibility to agents of war, both artificial and human, thus seem to be at odds with the idea that the use of autonomous weapons would generate responsibility gaps. Philosophers who oppose using autonomous weapons on moral grounds, therefore, may want to avoid argumentative strategies that rely heavily on worries about responsibility gaps.

In this chapter I discuss the role of mind perception in the categorization of individuals as moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are defined as individuals that can commit morally wrong actions and deserve to be held accountable for those actions; moral patients are defined as individuals that can be morally wronged and whose interests are worthy of moral consideration. It is generally agreed that the attribution of moral agency and moral patiency is linked to the attribution of mental capacities and traits. The chapter surveys a variety of models of mind perception, some of which focus on the representation of mental capacities, some of which focus on the representation of mental traits. The dominant model of mind perception in moral psychology is the experience-agency model (Gray et al., 2007), which divides the space of mindedness into experiential capacities like sentience and self-awareness, and agentic capacities like deliberative reasoning and self-control. Reviewing the empirical literature on moral categorization, I argue that neither the experience-agency model nor any of the major alternatives to it (i.e., the warmth-competence model, the agency-communion model, and the human nature–human uniqueness model), captures the full panoply of mental features to which everyday attributions of moral agency and moral patiency are sensitive.

Are judgments of praise for moral behavior modulated by knowledge of an agent's past suffering at the hands of others, and if so, in what direction? Drawing on multiple lines of research in experimental social psychology, we identify three hypotheses about the psychology of praise — typecasting, handicapping, and non-historicism — each of which supports a different answer to the question above. Typecasting predicts that information about past suffering will augment perceived patiency and thereby diminish perceived agency, making altruistic actions seem less praiseworthy; handicapping predicts that this information will make altruistic actions seem more effortful, and hence more praiseworthy; and non-historicism predicts that judgments of praise will be insensitive to information about an agent's experiential history. We report the results of two studies suggesting that altruistic behavior tends to attract more praise when the experiential history of the agent involves coping with adversity in childhood rather than enjoying prosperity (Study 1, N = 348, p = .03, d = 0.45; Study 2, N = 400, p = .02, d = 0.39), as well as the results of a third study suggesting that altruistic behavior tends to be evaluated more favorably when the experiential history of the agent includes coping with adversity than in the absence of information about the agent's past experience (N = 226, p = .002). This pattern of results, we argue, is more consistent with handicapping than typecasting or non-historicism.

Recent research suggests that moral behavior attracts more praise, and immoral behavior less blame, when the agent has suffered in childhood. In this paper we report results from three studies in which a fictional character’s childhood was described in terms of either neglect and abuse (Adversity condition), love and care (Prosperity condition), or neutrally (Control condition). In Study 1 (N = 248), participants in the Adversity condition attributed more praise to a fictional character relative to other conditions. In Study 2 (N = 275), participants in the Adversity condition attributed more praise and less blame relative to other conditions, with the effects mediated by self-expressivity. In Study 3 (N = 275), where the character was female rather than male, there was no effect of condition on praise, but there was an effect of condition on blame, and this effect was mediated by self-expressivity and social-emotional impairment.

Moral psychology—broadly speaking, the study of how people reason and act morally—has a long and productive history. Initially a subfield of philosophy, it posed groundbreaking questions about the nature of values and virtues, the balance of reason and emotion, and the gap between “is” and “ought.” In the twentieth century, the rise of psychology expanded the a priori philosophical enterprise into an empirical science. In psychology, perspectives of development, social interaction, cognition, and neuroscience brought new understanding and new questions. Over the past few decades, moral psychology has emerged as one of the most vital fields in the human sciences. The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology offers a state-of-the-art guide to this rapidly expanding field. It introduces central questions and recent insights, traces continuing puzzles and debates, and integrates empirical and theoretical perspectives. The interdisciplinary character of the volume reflects the fact that contemporary research in moral psychology is deeply informed by many disciplines and traditions, from its philosophical roots to its latest scientific discoveries in psychology, anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics, and more.

Moral judgments about a situation are profoundly shaped by the perception of individuals in that situation as either moral agents or moral patients (Gray & Wegner, 2009; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), Specifically, the more we see someone as a moral agent, the less we see them as a moral patient, and vice versa. As a result, casting the perpetrator of a transgression as a victim tends to have the effect of making them seem less blameworthy (Gray & Wegner, 2011). Based on this theoretical framework, we predicted that criminal offenders with a mental disorder that predisposes them to antisocial behavior would be judged more negatively when the disorder is described as having a genetic origin than when it is described as environmentally caused, as in the case of childhood abuse or accident. Further, we predicted that some environmental explanations would mitigate attributions of blame more than others, namely, that offenders whose disorder was caused by childhood abuse (intentional harm) would be seen as less blameworthy than offenders whose disorder is caused by an unfortunate accident (unintentional harm). Results from two vignette-based studies designed to test these predictions, conducted with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 244 and N = 387, respectively), confirmed the first prediction but not the second. Implications of this research for three areas — the psychology of moral judgment, philosophical debates about moral responsibility and determinism, and the practice of the law — are discussed in the sequel.

A naturalistic account of self-consciousness is developed within a general framework in which thought contents are structured by concepts but conceptual content need not be exhausted at the level of reference. To motivate the first feature of this framework, possible-worlds- and property-based theories of thought content, which eschew structure, are criticized for overestimating and/or underestimating the attitude stock of ordinary agents. To motivate the second feature, it is argued that neo-Russellian and neo-Fregean accounts, which incorporate structure but differ on the semantic classification of psychological modes of presentation, are more or less on a par with respect to standard parameters of evaluation . Though non-notational differences between these accounts remain, these differences add up to less than is commonly supposed. ;Neo-Russellians and neo-Fregeans agree on the explanatory relevance of conceptual modes of presentation, understood as reference-sustaining functional mechanisms; what they disagree about is whether those modes contribute to the content of a concept. Once the semantic dispute is set aside, questions about the nature of these mechanisms come to the fore. In the case of the self concept, what appears to distinguish this concept from coreferring items in an agent's conceptual repertoire is its privileged relation to inputs from internal monitoring systems, on one side, and outputs in control systems, on the other. Self-consciousness emerges as an atomistic conceptual capacity, sustained by both interoceptual mechanisms and agentive ones

Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are

In the context of debates about what form a theory of meaning should take, it is sometimes claimed that one cannot understand an intersective modifier-head construction (e.g., ‘pet fish’) without understanding its lexical parts. Neo-Russellians like Fodor and Lepore contend that non-denotationalist theories of meaning, such as prototype theory and theory theory, cannot explain why this is so, because they cannot provide for the ‘reverse compositional’ character of meaning. I argue that reverse compositionality is a red herring in these debates. I begin by setting out some positive arguments for reverse compositionality and showing that they fail. Then I show that the principle of reverse compositionality has two big strikes against it. First, it is incompatible with all theories of meaning on the market, including the denotationalism favored by neo-Russellians. Second, it explains nothing that is not already explained by its venerable predecessor, the principle of (forward) compositionality.

In this article, we present evidence of a bidirectional coupling between moral concern and the attribution of properties and states that are associated with experience (e.g., conscious awareness, feelings). This coupling is also shown to be stronger with experience than for the attribution of properties and states more closely associated with agency (e.g., free will, thoughts). We report the results of four studies. In the first two studies, we vary the description of the mental capacities of a creature, and assess the effects of these manipulations on moral concern. The third and fourth studies examine the effects of variations in moral concern on attributions of mindedness. Results from the first two studies indicate that moral concern depends primarily on the attribution of experience, rather than the attribution of agency. The results of the latter two studies demonstrate that moral concern increases attributions of mindedness, and that this effect is stronger for attributions of experience than for attributions of agency.

Some accounts of mental content represent the objects of belief as structured, using entities that formally resemble the sentences used to express and report attitudes in natural language; others adopt a relatively unstructured approach, typically using sets or functions. Currently popular variants of the latter include classical and neo-classical propositionalism, which represent belief contents as sets of possible worlds and sets of centered possible worlds, respectively; and property self-ascriptionism, which employs sets of possible individuals. I argue against their contemporary proponents that all three views are ineluctably plagued by generation gaps: they either overgenerate beliefs, undergenerate them, or both

Phenomenal consciousness and social cognition are interlocking capacities, but the relations between them have yet to be systematically investigated. In this paper, I begin to develop a theoretical and empirical framework for such an investigation. I begin by describing the phenomenon known as social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. I then adduce a related phenomenon known as affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person in social contexts. Experimental studies of these two phenomena suggest that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body – in short, that consciousness is ‘socially embodied’. In the second part of the paper I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I put these ideas together and show how they point to a circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness.

Does the ability to know one's own mind depend on the ability to know the minds of others? According to the 'theory theory' of first-person mentalizing, the answer is yes. Recent alternative accounts of this ability, such as the 'monitoring theory', suggest otherwise. Focusing on the issue of introspective access to propositional attitudes , I argue that a better account of first-person mentalizing can be devised by combining these two theories. After sketching a hybrid account, I show how it can do justice to competing intuitions about the nature of introspective self-awareness. I close by drawing some methodological morals about the study of mentalizing and the role of introspective evidence in cognitive science