Shawn Tinghao Wang

Unlike guilt and shame, embarrassment is rarely considered by philosophers to be a morally relevant emotion.This downplaying of embarrassment is well justified, given traditional views on moral agency. However, recent theorists have argued that the traditional views are too individualistic and overlook the external social conditions that they believe are part and parcel of our moral agency. Their alternative approach is often referred to as the “socially scaffolded accounts” of moral agency. In this paper, I argue that, if the socially scaffolded accounts are on the right track, then we should re‐examine the moral value of embarrassment. More specifically, I propose a moral alerting model to account for embarrassment's moral value and risks. The basic claim is that a kind of embarrassment—what I will refer to as moral embarrassment—plays an attention‐directing role in the process of responding to an audience's evaluative feedback. The moral alerting model demonstrates an intriguing tension between moral embarrassment's value and risks: though it is valuable in contributing to moral agency by virtue of its attention‐directing role, it causes systematic risks when it comes to successfully engaging with the social feedback that one is sensitive to.

Many existing theories of intellectual humility primarily focus on what it is to be a good learner. But learner is not the only epistemic role. An epistemic agent can frequently perform the role of a teacher who transmits rather than receives knowledge, or the role of a collaborator who works with others collectively on an intellectual project. I argue that there are fruitful ways of understanding intellectual humility that can account for how one excels at performing these alternative epistemic roles. Specifically, I propose and defend a “selective self-decentering account” of intellectual humility: an individual is an intellectually humble person just in case that she is motivated to perform each of her epistemic roles well, is motivated to balance her epistemic roles well against each other, and has a strong disposition to decenter selective aspects of herself because of these motivations. This account allows intellectual humility to have both a basic form and various role-differentiated forms, and it is well-equipped to explain how an intellectually humble individual’s motivations and dispositions are properly sensitive to her epistemic role.

According to a prominent view, all blameworthy wrongdoers deserve to feel guilt at some point in time and to some degree. In this paper, I pose a challenge against this view by examining cases involving extremely small wrongdoings. I contend that, granted that defenders of the above view have provided strong intuitive support and reasons for their thesis when it comes to the morally severe wrongdoings, similar considerations do not extend to the extremely small wrongdoings. I then consider three alternative forms of the thesis about deserved guilt. I suggest that the challenge from extremely small wrongdoings can be extended to criticize two of them as well. Though the third form remains promising, it would require us to significantly revise our understanding of the roles of guilt in moral responsibility practices.

A great deal of current research on moral judgments centers on moral dilemmas concerning tradeoffs between one and five lives. Whether one considers killing one innocent person to save five others to be morally required or impermissible has been taken to determine whether one is appealing to consequentialist or non-consequentialist reasoning. But this focus on tradeoffs between one and five may obscure more nuanced commitments involved in moral decision-making that are revealed when the numbers and ratio of lives to be traded off are varied, and when the probabilities of each outcome occurring are less than certain. Four studies examine participants' reactions to scenarios that diverge in these ways from the standard ones. Study 1 examines the extent to which people are sensitive to the ratio of lives saved to lives ended by a particular action. Study 2 verifies that the ratio rather than the difference between the two values is operative. Study 3 examines whether participants treat probabilistic harm to some as equivalent to certainly harming fewer, holding expected ratio constant. Study 4 explores an analogous issue regarding the sensitivity of probabilistic saving. Participants are remarkably sensitive to expected ratio for probabilistic harms while deviating from expected value for probabilistic saving. Collectively, the studies provide evidence that people's moral judgments are consistent with the principle of threshold deontology.

Theorists are divided concerning the productivity of angry blame. Some argue that it has tremendous instrumental values or serves crucial social functions. But some argue that it is counterproductive, and we should thereby eliminate, or drastically revise, blame as a kind of moral practice. In this paper, I raise a new counterproductivity critique of angry blame. In contrast to the existing critiques, my critique does not rely on a negative characterization of blame’s content or functionality. I suggest that angry blame serves two positive social functions—a function of issuing a moral protest and a function of initiating and facilitating a moral dialogue. However, for these two functions to work optimally, they require different psychological stances in tension with each other. Angry blame is thus counterproductive, not because it is inherently bad, but because it is designed to do too much.

Many existing theories of intellectual humility primarily focus on what it is to be a good learner. But learner is not the only epistemic role. An epistemic agent can frequently perform the role of a teacher who transmits rather than receives knowledge, or the role of a collaborator who works with others collectively on an intellectual project. I argue that there are fruitful ways of understanding intellectual humility that can account for how one excels at performing these alternative epistemic roles. Specifically, I propose and defend a “selective self-decentering account” of intellectual humility: an individual is an intellectually humble person just in case that she is motivated to perform each of her epistemic roles well, is motivated to balance her epistemic roles well against each other, and has a strong disposition to decenter selective aspects of herself because of these motivations. This account allows intellectual humility to have both a basic form and various role-differentiated forms, and it is well-equipped to explain how an intellectually humble individual’s motivations and dispositions are properly sensitive to her epistemic role.

Functionalist accounts of blame have been rising in popularity. Proponents of the approach claim that, by defining blame in terms of its function or functions, their account has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide range of attitudes and activities as blame; but their opponents question the extensional and explanatory adequacy of such accounts. This paper contributes to this burgeoning literature by presenting new challenges to the existing functionalist accounts. The fundamental problem, I shall argue, lies in the fact that they all focus on using functions to define blame as a type of practice, but this strategy fails to pick out a unique moral-psychological type and does not offer a complete set of extension-determining criteria for the concept of blame. This amounts to a serious theoretical disadvantage. I consider various responses to the challenges throughout the paper, concluding that the best reply available to the functionalist theorist involves using functions to directly define blame tokens.

Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising modification of the communication argument.

According to the response-dependence view of moral responsibility, a person is morally responsible just in case, and in virtue of the fact that, she is an appropriate target for reactive attitudes. This paper raises a new puzzle regarding response-dependence: there is a mismatch between the granularity of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility facts. Whereas the reactive attitudes are comparatively coarse-grained, responsibility facts can be quite fine-grained. This poses a challenge for response-dependence, which seeks to ground facts about responsibility in facts about the reactive attitudes. Specifically, reactive attitudes are not enough for grounding facts about degrees of moral responsibility. The responsedependence view thus requires significant revisions or supplementations.

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore.

Psychologists and philosophers who pose moral dilemmas to understand moral judgment typically specify outcomes as certain to occur in them. This contrasts with real-life moral decision-making, which is almost always infused with probabilities (e.g., the probability of a given outcome if an action is or is not taken). Seven studies examine sensitivity to the size and location of shifts in probabilities of outcomes that would result from action in moral dilemmas. We find that moral judgments differ between actions that result in an equal increase in probability of harm (equal size), but have different end-states (e.g., an increase in harm probability from 25% to 50% or from 50% to 75%). This deviation from expected value is robust under separate evaluation, and increases when the comparison between shifts is made explicit under simultaneous evaluation. Consistent with the centrality of perceived harm in some models of moral judgment, perceived harm partially mediates sensitivity to location of harm probability shift. Unlike for shifts in harm probabilities, participants are insensitive to the location of shifts in probability of beneficial outcomes. They are also insensitive to the location of shifts in probability of analogous monetary losses and gains, suggesting an asymmetry between harm and benefit in moral reasoning, as well as an asymmetry between moral and monetary decision-making more broadly. Implications for normative philosophical theory and moral psychological theory, as well as practical applications, are discussed.

Some experimental philosophers have criticized the standard intuition-based methodology in philosophy. One worry about this criticism is that it is just another version of the general skepticism toward the evidential efficacy of intuition, and is thereby subject to the same difficulties. In response, Weinberg provides a more nuanced version of the criticism by targeting merely the philosophical use of intuition. I contend that, though Weinberg’s approach differs from general skepticism about intuition, its focus on philosophical practices gives rise to a new difficulty. Most extant experimental surveys investigate intuitions about particular cases through vignettes giving little contextual information. However, philosophical practices crucially depend on intuitions about general claims and typically provide more contextual background. I argue that, due to these two differences between surveys’ and philosophers’ appeals to intuition, Weinberg’s critique lacks enough support from current experimental data. I conclude that experimental philosophers who engage in the negative program should pay more attention on testing philosophers’ use of general intuitions and context-rich intuitions.

This dissertation examines the recent arguments against the “Centrality” thesis—the thesis that intuition plays central evidential roles in philosophical inquiry—and their implications for the negative program in experimental philosophy. Two types of objections to Centrality are discussed. First, there are some objections which turn out to only work against Centrality when it is taken as a potential form of philosophical exceptionalism. I respond by showing that negative experimental philosophy doesn’t need the assumption that philosophy is distinctive in its reliance on intuitions. Second, there are some objections which turn out to be related to some particular view concerning the nature of evidence. In response, I distinguish between several different versions of Centrality, and argue that the version of Centrality that experimentalists need remains innocuous. Though none of the arguments against Centrality works as intended, I agree with its opponents that negative experimental philosophers have mischaracterized philosophical practice in a way which has problematic consequences for at least some versions of their argument. Specifically, I contend that philosophical practice grants important evidential status to general intuitions and context-rich intuitions, but extant experimental studies have almost exclusively focused on case intuitions and context-poor intuitions. I conclude that those who work on the negative program of experimental philosophy need to more carefully examine how philosophers actually use intuition in their practice.

Some experimental philosophers criticize standard philosophical methodology on the basis of survey data reporting variation of intuition according to irrelevant factors like culture and order. I will refer to them as “experimentalists” and their critique as the “experimental critique.” Recently, a few philosophers (e.g., Williamson, Deutsch, and Cappelen) have responded by noting that the experimental critique relies on the “Centrality” assumption—the thesis that intuition plays a central evidential role in philosophical inquiry.1 They then deny the Centrality thesis and claim that, therefore, intuition variation has no significant implications for philosophical methodology. In this paper, I defend Centrality in response to two recent objections: the “argument from non-neutrality” and the “argument from reasoning.” According to the argument from non-neutrality, we should not believe the truth of Centrality because it is ill- motivated by a particular dialectical standard of evidence. According to the argument from reasoning, philosophical practice relies on argumentation rather than intuition as its central evidence. As will be seen, both objections have different implications for different versions of Centrality. Though they constitute some prima facie strong reasons to deny some particular versions of Centrality, I shall argue, neither of them successfully undermines the version of Centrality that experimentalists need. Along the way, I will draw some parallels between intuition and perception.