Shaun Nichols

_Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings_ is the first book to bring together the most significant contemporary and historical works on the topic from both philosophy and psychology. Provides a comprehensive introduction to moral psychology, which is the study of psychological mechanisms and processes underlying ethics and morality Unique in bringing together contemporary texts by philosophers, psychologists and other cognitive scientists with foundational works from both philosophy and psychology Approaches moral psychology from an empirically informed perspective Explores a wide range of topics from passion and altruism to virtue and responsibility Editorial introductions to each section explain the background of and connections between the selections.

La philosophie expérimentale est un mouvement récent qui tente de faire progresser certains débats philosophiques grâce à l'utilisation de méthodes expérimentales. À la différence de la philosophie conventionnelle qui privilégie l'analyse conceptuelle ou la spéculation, la philosophie expérimentale préconise le recours aux études empiriques pour mieux comprendre les concepts philosophiques. Apparue il y a une dizaine d'années dans les pays anglo-saxons, cette approche constitue actuellement l'une des branches les plus dynamiques de la philosophie contemporaine. L'objectif de cet ouvrage est d'offrir un contact direct avec les travaux les plus connus et les plus discutés des philosophes expérimentaux. Il regroupe ainsi dix textes représentatifs de ce domaine jeune, mais déjà florissant, et couvre une large partie du champ philosophique contemporain (philosophie du langage, théorie de la connaissance, conscience, théorie de l'action, éthique et philosophie des sciences).

Sometimes we do what other people tell us to. A natural thought is that the motivation to act on an instruction comes about rationally as the result of interpreting an imperative and deciding to act on it; that is, by updating on information that gets mediated through belief‐desire reasoning. We defend an alternative “Spinozan” view about how instructions—specifically those performed with imperative sentences—might give rise to a motivation to act, namely, that when someone is told to do something, this activates motivations directly, without the person updating on information that gets mediated through belief‐desire reasoning. We will discuss two general strategies for thinking about how imperatives might supply motivation that are consistent with this view—one based on models of dissonance reduction and the other involving a more direct link between imperative utterances and motivational mental states. We will conclude with a discussion of how ecological considerations might favor a Spinozan process of motivation from imperatives.

Abhidharma Buddhism maintains that the only ultimately real (paramārtha) entities in the universe are dharmas, which are simples. What then is the ontological status of composites on this theory? One possibility is that Abhidharma Buddhists deny the reality of composites. We argue, however, that Abhidharma Buddhists affirm the reality of some composites, based on the causal efficacy of the composites. This depends on distinguishing between two notions of reality—ultimate reality (paramārtha) and substantial reality (dravyasat). If an entity is causally efficacious, it counts as substantially real. Abhidharma Buddhists affirm the substantial reality of material composites (like the eye); in this case, the causal powers of the composite are of the same type of the causal powers of the constituent dharmas. Abhidharma Buddhists also affirm the substantial reality of mental composites (like sensory episodes), which are composed of diverse kinds of dharmas. We argue that in the latter case Abhidharma Buddhists are committed to some form of emergentism.

Although collision-like causes are fundamental in philosophical and psychological theories of causation, humans conceptualize many events as causes that lack direct contact. Here we argue that how people think and talk about different causes is deeply connected, and investigate how children learn this mapping. If Andy hits Suzy with his bike, Suzy falls into a fence and it breaks, Andy ‘caused’ the fence to break but Suzy ‘broke’ it. If Suzy forgets sunscreen and gets sunburned, the absence of sunscreen ‘caused’ Suzy’s sunburn, but the sun ‘burned’ her skin. We tested 691 children and 270 adults. Four-year-old children mapped ‘caused’ to distal causes and ‘broke’ to proximal causes (Experiment 1). Although 4-year-old children did not map ‘caused’ to absences until later (Experiment 2), they already referred to absences when asked ‘why’ an outcome occurred (Experiment 3). Our findings highlight the role of semantics and pragmatics in developing these mappings.

This chapter focuses on arguments that derive philosophically significant conclusions from the assumption of one or another theory of reference—what are called “arguments from reference.” It first considers the structure of arguments from reference, and reviews a number of projects in several areas of philosophy that employ such arguments. It then shows that while intuitions about reference are central in the philosophy of language for finding the correct theory of reference, the recent empirical work of Machery and colleagues suggests that intuitions about reference vary both within and across cultures. Next, it takes the variation suggested by this empirical work for granted and considers its implications for arguments from reference. It concludes that arguments from reference ought to be relinquished.

One way that cognitive science can inform our metaphysical views is by explaining why we have the metaphysical views that we do. Psychological explanations can serve to debunk our intuitive metaphysical commitments when the commitments derive from an epistemically defective process. But psychological explanations can also serve to vindicate our intuitive commitments when they derive from epistemically proper processes. This chapter explores both debunking and vindicating arguments for the belief in moral objectivity. The debunking argument draws on work suggesting that the belief in objectivity is generated from epistemically defective emotional/motivational processes. The vindicatory argument draws on the finding that beliefs about consensus correlate with beliefs about objectivity, and argues that a rational learner would often be right to take consensus information as evidence regarding objectivity.

Recent empirical work confirms what many have long believed—ordinary people endorse and act on the basis of norms of retributive justice. Norms of retributive justice are, however, notoriously difficult to justify. This leads many philosophers to reject the legitimacy of those norms. Other philosophers attempt to justify retributivism by adverting to some objective moral footing (e.g., Kant, Moore). In this chapter, I assume that morality is not objective and proceed to argue that retributive norms form part of a set of norms that do not need justification. Of course, this does not mean that retributivism should stand, all things considered. To determine whether we should ultimately preserve our retributive norms will depend on a number of other factors, including both the expected utilities and our other core values.

This chapter argues that the recent attempts to use Chomsky-style arguments in support of innate moral knowledge are uniformly unconvincing. The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 1 sets out the basic form of the central argument in the Chomskian arsenal — the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument, as well as the conclusions about domain specificity and innate propositional knowledge that are supposed to follow. Section 2 distinguishes three hypotheses about innateness and morality: rule nativism, moral principle nativism, and moral judgment nativism. Sections 3–5 consider each of these hypotheses. It is argued that while there is some reason to favour rule nativism, the arguments that moral principles and moral judgment derive from innate moral knowledge don't work. The capacity for moral judgment is better explained by appeal to innate affective systems rather than innate moral knowledge. In the final section, it is argued that the role of such affective mechanisms in structuring the mind complicates the standard picture about poverty of the stimulus arguments and nativism. For the affective mechanisms that influence cognitive structures can make contributions that are neither domain general nor domain specific.

This chapter addresses the idea of consciousness as a personal matter, something that cannot be publicly acknowledged. Philosophers are baffled by the fact that human beings tend to ascribe conscious states to other creatures, prompting them to develop various theories in an attempt to explain this phenomenon. John Stuart Mill was among these speculators and his analogical theory is discussed in this chapter, along with Susan Johnson and her colleagues' study of the intrinsic processes of the attribution of a mind to an individual. It also looks at the so-called Agency model; a theory derived from developmental psychology which explains what causes man to think that other creatures possess conscious states.

Theories of meaning and reference have been at the heart of analytic philosophy since the beginning of the twentieth century. Two views have dominated the field: the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference. The common wisdom in philosophy is that Kripke has refuted the traditional descriptivist theories of reference by producing some famous stories which elicit intuitions that are inconsistent with these theories. Recent work in cultural psychology has indicated the possibility that the intuitions that guide theorizing in this domain might differ between members of East Asian and Western cultures. This chapter presents evidence that intuition probes, closely modeled on Kripke's stories, elicit significantly different responses from East Asians (Hong Kong undergraduates) and Westerners (American undergraduates). It discusses the significance of this finding for the philosophical pursuit of a theory of reference.

This chapter first explains why folk psychology has played such an important role in recent philosophy of mind. It then distinguishes two different accounts of folk psychology, and argues that functionalists should prefer the mindreading account on which folk psychology is the rich body of information or theory that underlies people's skill in attributing mental states and in predicting and explaining behavior. It considers the challenge posed by simulation theory, that there is no such thing as folk psychology; and presents reasons for accepting a hybrid account of mindreading in which some aspects of that skill are explained by appeal to information- rich processes, while other aspects are explained by simulation.

Robert Gordon and Alvin Goldman, along with other philosophers, have challenged the received view about the cognitive mechanisms underlying our ability to describe, predict, and explain people's behavior. They agree in denying that an internally represented folk-psychological theory plays a central role in the exercise of these abilities. They also believe that a special sort of mental _simulation_ in which we use ourselves as a model for the person we are describing or predicting, will play an important role in the correct account of the mechanisms subserving these abilities. This chapter focuses on Gordon and Goldman. It presents an account of the special sort of simulation that lies at the heart of the Gordon/Goldman proposal, focusing on the way simulation might be used to predict behavior. It explores how mental simulation might be used to explain the other two cognitive capacities that have been of special interest to philosophers: explaining behavior and producing intentional descriptions or interpretations. It explains why none of the arguments offered by Gordon and Goldman in support of their simulation theory are convincing. It then sets out two alternative arguments that show why, in light of currently available evidence, the simulation theory is very implausible.

This chapter surveys empirical evidence linking emotions to moral judgments and describes several processing models that are consistent with these data. It then considers the question of which particular emotions are involved in moral judgment, and suggests a way to distinguish moral and non-moral emotions that does not require a cognitive theory of what emotions are. Finally, the chapter discusses two particularly important moral emotions—anger and guilt—describing the conditions under which they arise and their distinctive contributions to moral motivation.

Consciousness often presents itself as a problem for materialists because, no matter which physical explanation we consider, there seems to remain something about conscious experience that hasn't been fully explained, giving rise to an apparent _explanatory gap_. The explanatory gap between the physical and the conscious is reflected in the broader population, in which dualistic intuitions abound. Drawing on recent empirical evidence, this chapter presents a dual-process cognitive model of consciousness attribution. The model provides an important part of the explanation for dualism being so attractive and the explanatory gap so vexing.

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence-based reasoning. In a final study, we show that the rejection of universalism does not generate a simple subjectivism but is associated with a more moderate relativism on which highly atypical positions are regarded as mistaken.

People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and equivocal evidence to interpret candidate rules as applying more narrowly than utilitarian rules.

It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self. This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations. Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another.