• Contributors

  • Alastair Norcross
  • Alison Hills
  • Andrew Reisner
  • Antti Kauppinen
  • Bart Streumer
  • Brian McElwee
  • Dan Moller
  • Daniel Star
  • David Enoch
  • David Owens
  • David Wasserman
  • Fiona Woollard
  • Frances Kamm
  • Gerald Lang
  • Gilbert Harman
  • Guy Kahane
  • Hagop Sarkissian
  • Helen Frowe
  • Iwao Hirose
  • James Morauta
  • Japa Pallikkathayil
  • Jeff McMahan
  • John Broome
  • John Oberdiek
  • Jonas Olson
  • Joseph Raz
  • Julia Driver
  • Kimberley Brownlee
  • Krister Bykvist
  • Laura Franklin-Hall
  • Matthew Smith
  • Matthew Silverstein
  • Melinda Roberts
  • Mike Otsuka
  • Neil Levy
  • Nicholas Southwood
  • Nick Shackel
  • Nir Eyal
  • Rahul Kumar
  • Rebecca Roache
  • Richard Ashcroft
  • S. Matthew Liao
  • Saul Smilansky
  • Sergio Tenenbaum
  • Shlomi Segall
  • Simon Kirchin
  • Stephen Kearns
  • Thom Brooks
  • Toby Ord
  • Tom Douglas
  • Tom Hurka
  • Ulrike Heuer
  • Wlodek Rabinowicz

• Readings

  • 
    From Normativity to Responsibility
    Joseph Raz
    
  • 
    Ethics and Moral Philosophy
    Thom Brooks
    
  • 
    Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover
    N. Ann Davis, Richard Keshen and Jeff McMahan
    
  • 
    Reflective Knowledge
    Ernest Sosa
    
  • 
    Know How
    Jason Stanley
    
  • 
    New Waves in Ethics
    Thom Brooks
    
  • 
    Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War
    F. M. Kamm
    
  • 
    On What Matters
    Derek Parfit
    
  • 
    Semantic Relationism
    Kit Fine
    
  • 
    All the Power in the World
    Peter Unger
    
  • 
    Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory
    Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni
    
  • 
    Beyond Humanity?
    Allen E. Buchanan
    
  • 
    Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
    Patricia S. Churchland
    
  • 
    Equality and Tradition
    Samuel Scheffler
    
  • 
    Climate Ethics
    Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue
    
  • 
    The Character of Consciousness
    David J. Chalmers
    
  • 
    Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
    Thomas Nagel
    
  • 
    Well-Being and Death
    Ben Bradley
    
  • 
    The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoisim
    Alison Hills
    
  • 
    Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation
    Michael Strevens
    
  • 
    The Case for Contextualism
    Keith DeRose
    
  • 
    When Truth Gives Out
    Mark Richard
    
  • 
    The Idea of Human Rights
    Charles R. Beitz
    
  • 
    Willing, Wanting, Waiting
    Richard Holton
    
  • 
    The Idea of Justice
    Amartya Sen
    
  • 
    Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem
    Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman
    
  • 
    What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being
    Richard Kraut
    
  • 
    Content and Justification
    Paul A. Boghossian
    
  • 
    Thoughts: Papers on Mind, Meaning, and Modality
    Stephen Yablo
    
  • 
    Normativity
    Judith Jarvis Thomson
    
  • 
    How We Get Along
    J. David Velleman
    
  • 
    Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity
    Christine M. Korsgaard
    
  • 
    Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason
    Sergio Tenenbaum
    
  • 
    Killing in War
    Jeff McMahan
    
  • 
    Experimental Philosophy
    Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols
    
  • 
    Disadvantage
    Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit
    
  • 
    Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics
    Allan Gibbard
    
  • 
    Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame
    T. M. Scanlon
    
  • 
    The Philosophy of Philosophy
    Timothy Williamson
    
  • 
    Morality without Foundations
    Mark Timmons
    
  • 
    Authority and Estrangement
    Richard Moran
    
  • 
    Moral Psychology, Volume 1
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    
  • 
    The Reflective Life
    Valerie Tiberius
    
  • 
    Moral Literacy
    Barbara Herman
    
  • 
    On Human Rights
    James Griffin
    
  • 
    Experiments in Ethics
    Kwame Anthony Appiah
    
  • 
    Reasons without Rationalism
    Kieran Setiya
    
  • 
    Moral Realism: A Defence
    Russ Shafer-Landau
    
  • 
    The Way We Eat
    Peter Singer and Jim Mason
    
  • 
    Metaphysical Essays
    John Hawthorne
    
  • 
    10 Moral Paradoxes
    Saul Smilansky
    
  • 
    Normativity and the Will
    R. Jay Wallace
    
  • 
    Ideal Code, Real World
    Brad Hooker
    
  • 
    The Nature of Normativity
    Ralph Wedgwood
    
  • 
    Structures of Agency: Essays
    Michael E. Bratman
    
  • 
    The Second-Person Standpoint
    Stephen Darwall
    
  • 
    Ethics and the A Priori
    Michael Smith
    
  • 
    Weighing Lives
    John Broome
    
  • 
    Reasons and the Good
    Roger Crisp
    
• 
  This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
  

Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Guest editors: Mark Phelan & Adam Waytz
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2012

When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. Contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moral cognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy are invited.

3rd – 4th May 2012
Institute of Philosophy, London, UK

Confirmed speakers:
Fiery Cushman, Psychology, Brown University, USA
Adam Feltz, Philosophy, Schreiner University, USA
Urs Fischbacher, Economics, University of Konstanz, Germany
Natalie Gold, Philosophy, King’s College London, UK
Shaun Nichols, Philosophy, University of Arizona
Briony Pulford, Psychology, University of Leicester, UK

This is an end-of-project workshop arising from a two-year study entitled “Framing Effects in Ethical Dilemmas” in which Natalie Gold, Andrew Colman, and Briony Pulford investigated contextual factors affecting moral decisions. The project included a series of experiments in which trolley problems and related ethical dilemmas were presented to people in contexts that were systematically varied to throw light on factors affecting their responses. Experiments included both hypothetical questions and incentivised choices, of the kind associated with experimental economics.

October 7, 2011
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Invited speakers:
James Beebe (Buffalo)
Mark Phelan (Lawrence)
Stephen Clarke (Oxford)
Frank Hindriks (Groningen)
Katinka Quintelier (Ghent)

The program of the workshop has slightly changed. Stephen Stich, one of the earlier invited speakers, had to cancel his talk owing to health problems. Mark Phelan (previously at Yale, now at Lawrence) will fill in for Steve Stich.

Registration for this event is free of charge. For more info (full program, travel, registration), visit the workshop’s website here.

Workshop organizers: Martin Peterson & Krist Vaesen (Eindhoven)

Oxford University Press has launched the new Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy series edited by Joshua Knobe, Tania Lombrozo, and Shaun Nichols. The series joins other successful volumes in the Oxford Studies in . . . series, which bring together original articles on all aspects of their respective topics. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy will publish a volume every two years, featuring outstanding papers at the cutting edge of experimental philosophy as well as papers that engage in critical discussion of the field. Philosophers and scientists alike are invited to contribute.

Fellow philosophers will no doubt be familiar with the curious book, Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The book defends “libertarian paternalism” and a view of behavioural economics. While I have not been convinced by its arguments, it is a good read and I’ve half expected Nudge to be the subject of at least a small wave of papers in ethics and political philosophy. I’m not the only one who thought its ideas would find traction: the British government has also commissioned research into how it might “nudge” the public into healthier lifestyles, for example.

Hi everyone,

I’d be quite interested in your intuitions regarding this case. So as not to bias anyone’s judgment unnecessarily, I’ll open the post for comments after I close the poll. Also, please vote only once. Thanks in advance!

A member of a local gang went to the leader and said, ‘We are thinking of trying a new tactic. It will flood the neighborhood with cheaper cocaine, increasing our profits, but it will also harm the cops since more cops will die in drug-related violence.’

The leader answered, ‘I don’t really care at all about harming the cops. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s implement the new tactic.’

They did implement the new tactic, and sure enough, the cops were harmed since more cops died in drug-related violence.

In “Putting the Trolley in Order: Experimental Philosophy and the Loop Case” (forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology), Alex Wiegmann, Joshua Alexander and Gerard Vong and I applied the methods of experimental philosophy to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous Loop Case. As the readers will know, Thomson used the Loop Case to cast doubt on the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect. Many philosophers share Thomson’s intuitions about this case (see, e.g. Kamm 2007 and Scanlon 2008), though not all (see, e.g. Otsuka 2008 and my paper in 2009). In fact, Frances Kamm developed the Doctrine of Triple Effect (DTE) in order to explain Loop intuitions.

The Experimental Month Initiative hosts 17 different experimental philosophy studies designed by 29 philosophers, each working on illuminating a different philosophical question.

Please take a moment to help these philosophers out, either by stopping by the Experiment Month website to fill out a brief questionnaire or by spreading the word about these new studies.

7th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication
6-8 May 2011, Riga, Latvia

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO 6 FEBRUARY 2011.

INVITED ORGANIZERS: Michael Bishop (Florida State University), Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)

INVITED SPEAKERS include:
Michael Bishop (Florida State University)
Luc Faucher (Université du Québec a Montréal)
Joshua Knobe (Yale University)
Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh)
Dominic Murphy (University of Sydney)
Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona)
Jesse Prinz (City University of New York)
Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)
Don Ross (University of Cape Town)
Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)
Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota)

Moral philosophers disagree about a lot of stuff.  They disagree, for example, on whether moral properties exist and, if so, what the heck they are and how we have knowledge of them; on whether one can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ and, if not, whether this really matters or not; on whether moral judgments are the deliverances of affective or purely cognitive faculties; on whether moral omissions have the same status as moral comissions; and a whole lot besides.

One particular claim, though, seems to have widespread endorsement—the claim that ordinary folk are objectivists when it comes to morality.  According to this view, ordinary folk believe moral issues admit of a single correct answer, and reject the idea that two people with conflicting positions on a moral issue may both be right.  This claim of  ’folk objectivism’ enjoys a surprising degree of consensus, and can be found in the works of a diverse range of moral philosophers with disparate theoretical commitments (e.g. Blackburn 1984; Brink 1989; Gibbard 1992; Mackie 1977; Shafer-Landau 2003).  It is a datum that most metaethical theories try to vindicate or accommodate.  But is this claim correct?  The answer would seem to be important, as the claim of folk objectivism has played a significant role in theorizing about the nature of ethics.

103rd Annual Meeting of The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology
New Orleans, Louisiana
March 10-12, 2011

The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology invites submission of papers for its annual meeting March 10-12, 2011 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The submission deadline is November 1, 2010. Founded in 1904, SSPP promotes philosophy and psychology by facilitating the exchange of ideas among those engaged in these fields of inquiry. Papers on any philosophical topic are welcome. Topics that have
cross-discipline appeal are especially suitable. For more information on the 2011 meeting see: http://southernsociety.org/annualmeeting.htm

47th Cincinnati Philosophy Colloquium
21-23 October 2010
425 Tangeman University Center
University of Cincinnati

Speakers:
• Owen Flanagan, Duke University
• Hilary Kornblith, University of Massachusetts
• Michael Lynch, University of Connecticut
• Penelope Maddy, University of California
• David Papineau, King’s College London
• L. A. Paul, University of North Carolina
• Thomas Polger, University of Cincinnati
• Elliott Sober, University of Wisconsin

Free and open to the public. For more information or to RSVP please contact thomas.polger (at) uc.edu

The Experiment Month initiative is a program designed to help philosophers conduct experimental studies. If you are interested in running a study, you can send your study proposal to the Experiment Month staff. Then, if your proposal is selected for inclusion, they will conduct the study online, send you the results and help out with any statistical analysis you may need. All proposals are due Sept. 1.

For further information, see the Experiment Month website: http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/XM/

Do moral judgments form a psychological natural kind? Lately, Stephen Stich and his colleagues have been arguing on the basis of empirical evidence that the features psychologists have identified as key to moral judgment do not, as a matter of fact, cluster together in a lawlike fashion. In particular, they argue that harm attributions do not always evoke the signature moral response pattern of authority-independence and generality, and conclude that since the purported nomological cluster breaks down, moral judgments do not form a natural kind. Their argument, of course, leaves open the possibility that there is some other cluster to be found. I am not a big believer in nomological clusters, but I will propose an alternative content feature that does seem to pair with the signature moral pattern in a lawlike fashion. Namely, it seems that whenever people take a piece of behaviour to express, in context, any of a set of attitudes that ranges from disrespect to debasement, the signature moral pattern is evoked. (As usual, I’ll just focus on wrongness judgments.) In short, people are intuitive deontologists, and for all that Stich says, there may be a psychological natural kind of moral judgment. My alternative model involves commitment to a commonsense cultural relativism, but one of an entirely innocuous kind that poses no threat to moral objectivism. To distinguish it from standard or deference relativism, I’ll call it significance relativism.

Date: May 1, 2010
Time: 10am to 5pm
Location: NYU Silver Center, Room 207
Hosted by the Metro Experimental Research Group (MERG)

(All details available at: http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/metaxphi.htm)

A series of recent experimental studies have examined people’s intuitions about metaethical issues. Participants in this workshop will discuss the implications of these studies both for questions about people’s ordinary folk views and for broader philosophical questions about moral realism, moral relativism and expressivism.

Invited Speakers: Stephen Darwall, Geoff Goodwin, Gilbert Harman, Jesse Prinz, Hagop Sarkissian and David Wong

I’ll be presenting with some colleagues and I look forward to seeing you there!

This is the first in a series of posts about recent work in experimental philosophy. I will be examining some persistent general issues with the different experimental approaches by way of looking at particular papers in some detail. I’ll begin with ‘Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience’ by Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery. The problem that the study highlights is that everyday language is often vague, ambiguous, or just spoken loosely, so that we can’t draw conclusions about people’s concepts just by looking at what they say in response to prompts. We first need to tease out just what people mean, and this can’t be done in a survey that doesn’t allow for a back-and-forth between the researcher and the subject. This would be a problem even if experimentalists solved all the other problems raised by myself and others.

Readers might be interested in the Experimental Philosophy Page, which has over 100 papers covering causation, consciousness, folk psychology, intentional action, metaphilosophy and other areas of research, and which looks to be a very helpful resource. All entries have citations and links, and many also have excerpts or abstracts and links to the authors’ academic web page.

The site is set up such that anyone can edit and update the page, e.g., by adding a paper that isn’t yet included. In fact, the site will only continue to be useful if a decent number of people chip in and add to/update it. So if you have done research in this area, do chime in.

Experimental Philosophy is a new movement that uses experiments to address traditional philosophical questions. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has attracted prolific practitioners as well as ardent critics. (For more about Experimental Philosophy, see the recent article in the New York Times or the ongoing discussion at the Experimental Philosophy Blog.)

This summer, the NEH is sponsoring an Institute on Experimental Philosophy. The Institute will bring in over a dozen distinguished guest faculty, who will present their latest research across a wide range of issues and perspectives. The Institute will also provide participants with the opportunity to learn experimental methods that are used in Experimental Philosophy. The Institute will also provide participants with the opportunity to learn experimental methods that are used in Experimental Philosophy.

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