Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Bernard Gert's moral theory is among the clearest and most comprehensive on the contemporary scene. It touches on elements of the dominant ethical orientations—-utilitarianism, Kantianism, contractionism, and virtue ethics—without fitting neatly into any of those categories. For that reason, Gert's moral theory appeals to many ethicists dissatisfied with each of the dominant formulations. Rationality, Rules, and Ideals presents Gert's Morality, the reactions by a number of prominent scholars, and Gert's response. All told, it is a remarkably wide-ranging study of ethical theory. The work is broken down into six parts, making Rationality, Rules, and Ideals perfect for a broad-ranging course on ethical theory, following Gert's critiques of utilitariansim, Kantianism, and virtue ethics. Both students and professionals will find much material to work with in this volume. The papers contribute not only to the understanding of Gert's wide-ranging theory but to a number of important topics in ethic theory, the theory of rationality, and applied ethics.

The challenge of making healthcare decisions for incapacitated patients continues to confront stakeholders worldwide. Annette Rid and David Wendler proposed a Patient Preference Predictor (P3) that uses population-level data to infer an incapacitated patient’s likely treatment choices, with the aim of aligning care with the values and preferences they held when last autonomous. Some objectors claimed this would fail to respect patients’ (former) autonomy because the basis for prediction would not be specific to the individual (e.g., based on data reflecting their own specific reasons for preferring one course of action over another). In response, we proposed a ‘Personalised Patient Preference Predictor’ (P4) that would harness the predictive capacities of personalised large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on individual-level data of various kinds. The envisioned P4, if realized, would be akin to a ‘digital psychological twin’ or AI simulation of the patient that would encode their unique preferences and values to enable an individualised prediction of their likely treatment preferences. The P4, in turn, has been criticised on various grounds: philosophical, practical, and ethical. Here, we comprehensively evaluate the concerns of our critics based on all known published critiques as of the time of writing. While acknowledging the weight of some of these concerns, we argue that they do not entail that a P4 should not be developed. Rather, the concerns point to areas where thoughtful design choices, responsible regulation, and further philosophical reflection are needed to steer the proposal in a positive direction.

Despite disagreements on some moral issues, almost all individuals and cultures agree on certain basic moral judgments, such as that theft, rape, and murder of peers for personal gain are immoral. Psychopaths seem to be an exception. To test this common assumption, this chapter surveys research on moral judgments in psychopaths. The evidence is less clear than many assume, but probably some psychopaths disagree with our fundamental moral judgments. Does this disagreement support the skeptical conclusion that our fundamental moral judgments are not epistemically justified? Not if psychopaths are irrational, but the argument is that they are not irrational in any way that would justify dismissing their views as irrelevant to moral epistemology. These conclusions have radical implications within many theories, but contrastivist moral epistemology is shown to handle these surprising facts.

Whenever psychologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers draw conclusions about moral judgments in general from a small selected sample, they assume that moral judgments are unified by some common and distinctive feature that enables generalizations and makes morality worthy of study as a unified field. This chapter defends the idea that morality is disunified by arguing that the content of morality, the neural level of morality, and the function of morality all fail to be unified. It then argues that moral neuroscience should adopt a more fine-grained taxonomic approach that investigates more carefully defined groups of moral judgments.

Dissecting the Readiness Potential: An Investigation of the Relationship between Readiness Potentials, Conscious Willing, and Action The readiness potential (RP) has proven to be one of the most controversial topics in neuroscience and philosophy due to its perceived relevance in elucidating the role of conscious will for action. The controversy stemmed largely from Libet et al.’s (1983) report that the RP that precedes a volitional movement also precedes any conscious awareness of that movement. This chapter presents five experiments showing that (1) the RP does not reflect uniquely motor-related processing, while the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) likely does, and (2) that neither the RP nor the LRP index neural processes are causal of conscious willing. Both potentials seem unrelated to conscious intentions to move. The LRP seems to be associated with an actual neural signal to move. Although the exact nature of the neural processes remains unclear, they seem not to be specific to any particular action domain.

Reasons in general are answers to why-questions. Epistemic reasons say why someone should believe some proposition. Practical reasons tell agents why they should do some action. Explanatory reasons specify why some event happened. Practical reasons for actions are facts, whereas explanatory reasons for actions are desires or beliefs. Drawing these distinctions can help to solve some major puzzles about reasons, such as whether reasons have neural correlates in the brain. Some kinds do, but others do not. Despite their differences, all reasons are reasons because of their roles in explicit or implicit arguments.

Freedom in general needs to be analyzed as freedom _from_ some barrier _to_ do some act instead of certain alternatives. Incompatibilists understand free will and free action as freedom from determinism or causation, whereas compatibilists instead see free will and free action as freedom from constraint or excuse. The latter kind of freedom comes in degrees and requires reasons-responsiveness and/or an appropriate connection to a deep self. These kinds of freedom are important to different issues.

There are psychiatric conditions that resemble extreme moral character. Such is the case with Scrupulosity: a type of OCD in which the patient’s obsessions are religious and moral. Scrupulous patients may repeat prayers multiple times to ensure they have uttered the prayers sincerely, or they may feel excessive guilt for such things as looking at the naked bodies in an anatomy textbook. While a person with Antisocial Personality Disorder may appear to lack remorse and the ability to feel guilt, scrupulous patients seem to have too much of it. Do they have a disorder? One could argue that the scrupulous agent is simply much more conscientious than the rest of us. If so, she is morally praiseworthy, not mentally ill. This chapter argues that Scrupulosity is, indeed a disorder, because OCD patients have a distorted view of what is important.

Patients with Scrupulosity, a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with moral or religious obsessions and/or compulsions, appear to make moral judgments that are stricter or more stringent than others’ moral judgments. However, this chapter explains why those with Scrupulosity are making systematically _distorted_ moral judgments. First, it describes Scrupulosity as a distinctive form of OCD that characteristically exhibits three features: perfectionism, moral thought-action fusion, and chronic doubt. These features, which individually are compatible with genuine moral judgments, are the expression of underlying anxiety and thus lead to judgments that are distorted in at least three ways: (1) Anxiety narrows one’s attention to a small, self-focused range of factors that will best soothe one’s anxiety, at the expense of other factors that may be morally more important. (2) Anxiety leads one to focus on some factors that are not morally relevant. (3) Anxiety makes one’s judgments inflexible.

In Chapter 4, the authors explore whether neuroscience undermines morality. The authors distinguish, analyze, and assess the main arguments for neuroscientific skepticism about morality and argue that neuroscience does not undermine _all_ of our moral judgments, focusing the majority of their attention on one argument in particular—the idea that neuroscience and psychology might undermine moral knowledge by showing that our moral beliefs result from unreliable processes. They argue that the background arguments needed to bolster the main premise fail to adequately support it. They conclude that the overall issue of neuroscience undermining morality is unsettled, but, they contend, we can reach some tentative and qualified conclusions. Neuroscience is, then, not a general underminer, but can play a constructive role in moral theory, although not by itself. In order to make progress, neuroscience and normative moral theory must work together.

The question of whether or not addicts are responsible for their addiction-related actions is confused both because addictions vary widely in important ways and also because responsibility comes in degrees that vary with the degree of control that an addict has over different decisions. I try to make sense out of this confusion by defining addiction in general and clarifying some dimensions along which control and responsibility vary in addiction. Then I address the common objection from transference, which claims that addicts are fully responsible for their actions because they were fully responsible for getting themselves addicted in the first place.

This chapter argues that Audi's views on moral intuitions, specifically concerning whether they can be justified without being based on inference, raise a number of questions Audi has yet to address. First, it asks, can moral intuitions be justified without reflection? Second, does Audi's account of reflection turn out to involve inference? And are conclusions of reflection therefore based on inference? Third, can conclusions of reflection be justified without second-order beliefs concerning the reliability of the reflection? And if not, wouldn't this also involve inference? Fourth, can conclusions of reflection be justified without at least an ability to infer? And if not, wouldn't this leave the view unable to block the skeptical regress?

Moral intuitions are strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs. Moral philosophers ask when they are justified. This question cannot be answered separately from a psychological question: How do moral intuitions arise? Their reliability depends upon their source. This chapter develops and argues for a new theory of how moral intuitions arise—that they arise through heuristic processes best understood as unconscious attribute substitutions. That is, when asked whether something has the attribute of moral wrongness, people unconsciously substitute a different question about a separate but related heuristic attribute (such as emotional impact). Evidence for this view is drawn from psychology and neuroscience, and competing views of moral heuristics are contrasted. It is argued that moral intuitions are not direct perceptions and, in many cases, are unreliable sources of evidence for moral claims.

Reasoning can be characterized along three dimensions: (1) practical/theoretical, (2) internal/external, and (3) conscious/unconscious. This chapter is concerned with internal reasoning. Although some theorists think that reasoning is always purely deductive, formal theories of deduction, probability theory, and utility theory must be distinguished from theories about how people do or ought to reason. The moral principles people accept often contain morally loaded terms and people often defend their moral views with general principles that they do not generally accept. A classical deductive theory of concepts as having necessary and sufficient conditions cannot be taken for granted. In contrast with the classical deductive model of reasoning, ordinary moral reasoning appears to aim at improving the overall coherence of one's view and get closer to a “reflective equilibrium”. Unfortunately, such reasoning is fragile.

This article presents an overview and critique of current interdisciplinary research on the nature and development of intellectual humility (IH), with the aim of systematically outlining currently debated open questions. We focus on four specific areas of research: (1) theoretical questions regarding the nature of IH, (2) issues with the measurement of IH in development, (3) existing research on the development of IH and related socio- cognitive abilities, and (4) interventions to increase IH in children and adolescents. We critically review the existing empirical and theoretical literature in these areas, identify and articulate open questions, and map out directions for future research that follow from these questions. The main theoretical issues we identify concern the distinction between different features of IH (i.e., internal vs external, self- vs other-directed) and their relation to each other as well as the distinction between IH as a prescriptive virtue as opposed to a descriptive character trait. As we will demonstrate, taking seriously the notion of IH as a virtue raises crucial questions for its empirical study in the contexts of measurement, development, and potential interventions.

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The neuroscience of morality is in its infancy, with the first brain imaging studies of moral development undertaken only in 2001. The contributors to volume 3 sample the best work in this very new field, discussing a variety of approaches, including functional imaging, lesion studies, abnormal psychology, and developmental neuroscience. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author(s) of the original essay. Topics include the neural basis of moral emotions and moral judgments as well as comparisons of normal adult moral judgments with those made by children, adolescents, and people with psychopathy, brain damage, and autism. Contributors to volume 3:_ _Abigail Baird, William Casebeer, Cordelia Fine, Nathan Fox, Uta Frith, Jordan Grafman, Joshua Greene, Catherine Hynes, Fatima Azavedo Ignacio, Richard Joyce, Jerome Kagan, Leonard Katz, Kent Kiehl, Jeanette Kennett, Melanie Killen, Daniel Lapsley, Heidi Maibom, Victoria McGeer, John Mikhail, Jorge Moll, Shaun Nichols, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Adina Roskies, Jana Schaich Borg, Katrina Sifferd, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Smith, Mark Timmons, Frederick de Vignemont, Paul Whalen, Roland Zahn.

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author(s) of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors: William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College.

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