In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral (...) virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to articulate a fruitful model in which to explore the virtues. Section 2 explores the relational nature of friendship, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 catalogues four motivations for taking seriously the friendship model of virtue. Section 4 applies the friendship model in depth to the virtue of trustworthiness. (shrink)

This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social (...) movements, including incels, men’s rights activists, and men-going-their-own-way. We show that many members of these groups are well-characterized by Katsafanas’s theory of fanaticism, and that they have forged their fanatical group identity using tools that philosophers have tended to associate with more benign social movements and the task of “conceptual engineering.” Indeed, we think that manosphere groups have in many cases been more successful than more palatable liberationist movements, and that this case study in the dark side of conceptual engineering may be both sobering and informative. (shrink)

Nietzsche talks about trust [vertraue*] and mistrust [misstrau*] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to trust in 90 passages and mistrust in 101 – approximately ten times as often as he refers to resentment/ressentiment. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and trust includes just a handful of publications. Worse still, I have been unable to find a single publication devoted to Nietzsche and mistrust. This chapter aims to fill (...) the gap in the secondary literature by using digital humanities methods to systematically investigate the functions of trust and mistrust in Nietzsche’s writings. I argue that Nietzsche offers three main insights into trust and an additional two into mistrust. When it comes to trust, in his free spirit works, he reflects on the development of interpersonal trust, with an eye to situations in which trust is or is not reciprocated. He also criticizes some of the heuristics people use to identify trustworthy partners, especially the notion that all and only people with stable character are trustworthy. And perhaps Nietzsche’s most interesting thoughts about trust relate to self-trust, which he thinks is often unjustifiably undermined. When it comes to mistrust, although he regards generalized mistrust as a sign of bad character, he also thinks that harnessing mistrust can be valuable in at least two domains. One is morality, where we are disposed to accept traditional pieties and would benefit from turning a suspicious eye towards these pieties. The other is science, which systematizes both trust and mistrust in pursuit of the truth. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

This edited volume examines the topic of trust and its place in the thought of several key figures from the history of philosophy. Drawing on thinkers and philosophical traditions from across the globe, the chapters focus especially on trust's moral and social dimensions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being used not only to classify and analyze but also to generate images and text. As recent work on the content produced by text and image Generative AIs has shown (e.g., Cheong et al., 2024, Acerbi & Stubbersfield, 2023), there is a risk that harms of representation and bias, already documented in prior AI and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms may also be present in generative models. These harms relate to protected categories such as (...) gender, race, age, and religion. There are several kinds of harms of representation to consider in this context, including stereotyping, lack of recognition, denigration, under-representation, and many others (Crawford in Soundings 41:45–55, 2009; in: Barocas et al., SIGCIS Conference, 2017). Whereas the bulk of researchers’ attention thus far has been given to stereotyping and denigration, in this study we examine ‘exnomination’, as conceived by Roland Barthes (1972), of religious groups. Our case study is DALL-E, a tool that generates images from natural language prompts. Using DALL-E mini, we generate images from generic prompts such as “religious person.” We then examine whether the generated images are recognizably members of a nominated group. Thus, we assess whether the generated images normalize some religions while neglecting others. We hypothesize that Christianity will be recognizably represented more frequently than other religious groups. Our results partially support this hypothesis but introduce further complexities, which we then explore. (shrink)

For decades, intelligence and achievement tests have registered significant differences between people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and genders. We argue that most of these differences are explained not as reflections of differences in the distribution of intellectual virtues but as evidence for the metacognitive mediation of the intellectual virtues. For example, in the United States, blacks typically score worse than whites on tests of mathematics. This might lead one to think that fewer blacks possess the relevant intellectual virtues, or (...) that they possess them less fully. However, research on stereotype threat shows that when blacks are not reminded of their race, they do much better on these tests than when they are. Simply raising to salience the race of the student triggers the activation of the stereotype, which in turn leads to poorer performance. However, learning about stereotype threat to a large extent immunizes people against it. This suggests that the psycho-social dimension of intelligence that recognizes the possibility of effects like stereotype threat is a crucial mediating variable in the development and expression of the intellectual virtues. The Socratic, “Know thyself” needs to be expanded to, “Know thyself and thy society.” Self-knowledge and knowledge of relevant stereotypes are a necessary condition for optimal development and expression of the other intellectual virtues. (shrink)

In the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion in conceptions of epistemic agency beyond the individualism characteristic of most earlier epistemology. We believe that these developments have not gone (...) far enough. While the weak anti-individualism we see in contemporary epistemology may be adequate for the kinds of cases it tends to focus on, a great deal of human knowledge production and transmission does not conform to these models. Furthermore, the dispositions and norms that are knowledge-conducive in the familiar cases may not be knowledge-conducive generally. In fact, dispositions that, at an individual level, count as epistemic vices may be epistemic virtues in common social contexts. We argue that this overlooked feature of human social life means that epistemology must become more deeply and pervasively social. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Attribution Bias in the Trials of Accused Serial Killers Introduction The Case of Doug Clark Situationism and Destructive Behavior Attribution Biases Seeing Ghosts “Ewww…Guilty!” “You people are all…” “Aren't you the guy who…?” Doug Clark Again Conclusion.

Strawson argues that we should understand moral responsibility in terms of our practices of holding responsible and taking responsibility. The former covers what is commonly referred to as backward-looking responsibility , while the latter covers what is commonly referred to as forward-looking responsibility . We consider new technologies and interventions that facilitate assignment of responsibility. Assigning responsibility is best understood as the second- or third-personal analogue of taking responsibility. It establishes forward-looking responsibility. But unlike taking responsibility, it establishes forward-looking responsibility (...) in someone else. When such assignments are accepted, they function in such a way that those to whom responsibility has been assigned face the same obligations and are susceptible to the same reactive attitudes as someone who takes responsibility. One family of interventions interests us in particular: nudges. We contend that many instances of nudging tacitly assign responsibility to nudgees for actions, values, and relationships that they might not otherwise have taken responsibility for. To the extent that nudgees tacitly accept such assignments, they become responsible for upholding norms that would otherwise have fallen under the purview of other actors. While this may be empowering in some cases, it can also function in such a way that it burdens people with more responsibility that they can (reasonably be expected to) manage. (shrink)

Philosophers have established that certain ethically important val- ues are modally robust in the sense that they systematically deliver correlative benefits across a range of counterfactual scenarios. In this paper, we contend that recourse – the systematic process of reversing unfavorable decisions by algorithms and bureaucracies across a range of counterfactual scenarios – is such a modally ro- bust good. In particular, we argue that two essential components of a good life – temporally extended agency and trust – are under- (...) written by recourse. We critique existing approaches to the conceptualization, op- erationalization and implementation of recourse. Based on these criticisms, we suggest a revised approach to recourse and give ex- amples of how it might be implemented – especially for those who are least well off. (shrink)

This chapter aims to expand the body of empirical literature considered relevant to virtue theory beyond the burned-over districts that are the situationist challenges to virtue ethics and epistemology. We thus raise a rather simple-sounding question: why doesn’t virtue epistemology have an account of intelligence? In the first section, we sketch the history and present state of the person-situation debate to argue for the importance of an interactionist framework in bringing psychological research in general, and intelligence research in particular, to (...) bear on questions of virtue. In Section 2, we discuss the history and present state of intelligence research to argue for its relevance to virtue epistemology. In Section 3, we argue that intelligence sits uneasily in both responsibilist and reliabilist virtue frameworks, which suggests that a new approach to virtue epistemology is needed. We conclude by placing intelligence within a new interactionist framework. (shrink)

Across two studies, one of which was pre-registered, we find that a simple questionnaire that measures intellectual virtue and vice predicts how many fake news articles and conspiracy theories participants accept. This effect holds even when controlling for multiple demographic predictors, including age, household income, sex, education, ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, and news consumption. These results indicate that self-report is an adequate way to measure intellectual virtue and vice, which suggests that they are not fully immune to introspective awareness or (...) “stealthy” in the sense that Cassam (2015) argues. This is an important methodological result and may pave the way for future research on intellectual virtue and vice. (shrink)

Aperçu historiographique et méthodologique -- Notes sur le corpus deschampsien -- La double monade. Un matérialisme au-delà du système moniste de Spinoza et du système physique de d'Holbach ; Formes de totalité dans la tradition platonicienne et néoplatonicienne ; Dialectique de un et multiple -- Métaphysique et théologie négative. Réflexion sur les idées que nous avons foncièrement de Dieu ; Contre la raison du temps ; Dieu non-créateur ; Dieu créateur; Les concepts dionysiens de Théarchie et [suressentialité] ; La connaissance (...) antinomique -- Le "fond" de la religion et le "fond" de l'homme. Observations métaphysiques ; Le Dieu de la tradition ; Le Dieu des philosophes ; Dieu indistinct et distinct ; Les antithèses de Meister Eckhart ; Le "moi métaphysique" -- Quid nihil ? L'existence du Néant ; Le Livre du Néant ; Tout ou Rien ; La correspondance avec Robinet. (shrink)

John Doris and Friedrich Nietzsche have a lot in common. In addition to being provocative and humorous writers in their native idioms, they share a conception of human agency. It can be tiresome to point out the priority claims of an earlier philosopher, so I should say at the outset that I do so not to smugly insist that my guy got there first but to showcase a closely-allied perspective that may shed additional light and offer glimpses around blind corners. (...) In particular, I argue that Nietzsche anticipates both the anti-reflective and the dialogical aspects of Doris’s theory of agency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I have argued elsewhere that the psychological aspects of Nietzsche’s later works are best understood from a psychodynamic point of view. Nietzsche holds a view I dubbed the tenacity of the intentional : When an intentional state loses its object, a new object replaces the original; the state does not disappear entirely. In this article I amend and clarify T to T“: When an intentional state with a subpropositional object loses its object, the affective component of the state persists (...) without a corresponding object, and that affect will generally be redeployed in a state with a distinct object. I then trace the development of the tenacity thesis through Nietzsche’s early and middle works. Along the way, I discuss a number of related topics, including the scope of the tenacity thesis, the reflexive turn one often finds in Nietzsche’s examples, and the relations among will to power, drives, and the tenacity of the intentional. (shrink)

This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conducted one exploratory and one confirmatory observational survey study on (...) Amazon Mechanical Turk among people living in the United States. We show that two psychological traits underlie the range of epistemic vices that we investigated: indifference to truth and rigidity. Indifference manifests itself in a lack of motivation to find the truth. Rigidity manifests itself in being insensitive to evidence. We develop a scale to measure epistemic vice with the subscales indifference and rigidity. The Epistemic Vice Scale is internally consistent; has good convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity; and is strongly associated with the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Epistemic vice explains additional variance in the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories over and above demographic and related psychological concepts and shows medium to large effect sizes across outcome measures. We demonstrate that epistemic vice differs from existing psychological constructs, and show that the scale can explain individual differences in dealing with misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conclude that epistemic vice might contribute to “postfactive” ways of thinking. (shrink)

Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more susceptible (...) to believing Covid-19 misinformation. We carried out an observational study (US sample, n = 998) in which we measured the level of epistemic vice of participants using a novel Epistemic Vice Scale. We also asked participants questions eliciting the extent to which they subscribe to myths and misinformation about Covid-19. We find overwhelming evidence to the effect that epistemic vice is associated with susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. In fact, the association turns out to be stronger than with political identity, educational attainment, scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, personality, dogmatism, and need for closure. We conclude that this offers evidence in favor of the empirical presuppositions of vice epistemology. (shrink)

We argue that moral decision making is reasons-based, focusing on the idea that people encounter decisions as questions to be answered and that they process reasons to the extent that they can see them as putative answers to those questions. After introducing our topic, we sketch the erotetic reasons-based framework for decision making. We then describe three experiments that extend this framework to moral decision making in different question frames, cast doubt on theories of moral decision making that discount reasons (...) and appeal, and replicate our initial finds in moral contexts that do not involve direct physical harm. We conclude by reinterpreting Stanley Milgram’s studies in destructive obedience in our new framework. (shrink)

The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under close scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial justice not to undermine trust in authoritative sources by spreading misinformation or directing attention to untrustworthy sources. Moreover, celebrities have a general imperfect duty (...) to try to correct for an unjust distribution of attention by redirecting it to those who deserve it. During a pandemic this may become a perfect one, due to the harm that could be prevented if people follow the advice of experts. Relatedly, we argue that celebrities have an imperfect duty to promote behavior that will reduce the spread of a pandemic. We outline three ways they might do so: they might take on the position of a role model, they may act as a salience magnet or they can direct people’s attention towards others who have taken on these roles. (shrink)

Contemporary virtue epistemology (hereafter ‘VE’) is a diverse collection of approaches to epistemology. At least two central tendencies are discernible among the approaches. First, they view epistemology as a normative discipline. Second, they view intellectual agents and communities as the primary focus of epistemic evaluation, with a focus on the intellectual virtues and vices embodied in and expressed by these agents and communities. -/- This entry introduces many of the most important results of the contemporary VE research program. These include (...) novel attempts to resolve longstanding disputes, solve perennial problems, grapple with novel challenges, and expand epistemology’s horizons. In the process, it reveals the diversity within VE. Beyond sharing the two unifying commitments mentioned above, its practitioners diverge over the nature of intellectual virtues, which questions to ask, and which methods to use. -/- It will be helpful to note some terminology before proceeding. First, we use ‘cognitive’, ‘epistemic’ and ‘intellectual’ synonymously. Second, we often use ‘normative’ broadly to include not only norms and rules, but also duties and values. Finally, ‘practitioners’ names contemporary virtue epistemologists. (shrink)

What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them to explain seven different (...) types of morality: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Here we explore the conjecture that these simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a much larger number of more complex moral ‘molecules’, and that as such morality is a combinatorial system. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise a candidate moral molecule, and successfully locate an example of it in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. These findings indicate that morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. Thus morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and powerful theory, that explains why there are many moral values, and successfully predicts what they will be; and it generates a systematic framework that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing. (shrink)

Everyone wants to be virtuous, but recent psychological investigations suggest that this may not be possible. Mark Alfano challenges this theory and asks, not whether character is empirically adequate, but what characters human beings could have and develop. Although psychology suggests that most people do not have robust character traits such as courage, honesty and open-mindedness, Alfano argues that we have reason to attribute these virtues to people because such attributions function as self-fulfilling prophecies - children become more (...) studious if they are told that they are hard-working and adults become more generous if they are told that they are generous. He argues that we should think of virtue and character as social constructs: there is no such thing as virtue without social reinforcement. His original and provocative book will interest a wide range of readers in contemporary ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and empirically informed philosophy. (shrink)

The intrinsic dialectic in Gabriel Marcel’s thought seems to be describable in terms of alteration and doubling. That dialectic arises from the experience of wonder and of emotion; it articulates itself within a doubled consciousness which is both exclamative and interrogative. This consciousness perpetuates the original moment of alteration and doubling in the pairs characterizing Marcel’s speculative proposal: being-having, mystery-problem, transcendence-immanence, infinite-finite.

In the last decade, experimental philosophers have documented systematic asymmetries in the attributions of mental attitudes to agents who produce different types of side effects. We argue that this effect is driven not simply by the violation of a norm, but by salient-norm violation. As evidence for this hypothesis, we present two new studies in which two conflicting norms are present, and one or both of them is raised to salience. Expanding one’s view to these additional cases presents, we argue, (...) a fuller conception of the side-effect effect, which can be reversed by reversing which norm is salient. (shrink)

The Moral Psychology of Regret assembles scholars from several disciplines, including philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, law and neuroscience, to present regret not merely as a feeling or affect but as an emotion of great moral significance that underwrites how we understand ourselves and each other.

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we present (...) new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side- effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous. (shrink)

Virtue-based moral cognitivism holds that at least some of the value of some art consists in conveying knowledge about the nature of virtue and vice. We explore here a challenge to this view, which extends the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. Evidence from social psychology indicates that individuals’ behavior is often susceptible to trivial and normatively irrelevant situational influences. This evidence not only challenges approaches to ethics that emphasize the role of virtue but also undermines versions of moral cognitivism, (...) because the value of art cannot consist in teaching us about traits that do not exist. We thus recommend a new account of the cognitive value of art: art teaches how context and character interact to produce action. (shrink)

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...) is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the relationship between misinformation and disagreement. We begin by arguing that one traditional bogeyman in this domain, ideological polarization, does not account for the many problems that have been documented. Instead, affective polarization seems to be the root cause of most of these problems. We then discuss the relationships between moral outrage, misinformation, and affective polarization. We next turn to the political implications of affective polarization and conclude by discussing some potential solutions to the problems that arise (...) in this area. (shrink)

The last few decades have witnessed the birth and growth of both virtue epistemology and the situationist challenge to virtue ethics. It seems only natural that eventually we would see the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology. This article articulates one aspect of that new challenge by spelling out an argument against the responsibilist brand of virtue epistemology. The trouble can be framed as an inconsistent triad: many people know quite a bit; knowledge is true belief acquired and retained through the (...) exercise of intellectual virtue; most people do not possess the intellectual virtues countenanced by responsibilism. Non‐skepticism is a Moorean platitude we should aim to preserve at most if not all costs. I muster evidence from cognitive and social psychology to argue for epistemic situationism. If my argument is correct, responsibilism must be revised or rejected, and reliabilists should avoid incorporating responsibilist components into their theories. (shrink)

Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviours ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In this paper, we explore the role played by technological design decisions in online self-radicalization in its myriad (...) guises, encompassing extreme as well as more mundane forms. We begin by characterizing the phenomenon of technological seduction. Next, we distinguish between top-down seduction and bottom-up seduction. We then situate both forms of technological seduction within the theoretical model of dynamical systems theory. We conclude by articulating strategies for combatting online self-radicalization. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the role that art can play in ethical reflection on risky and controversial technologies. New technologies often give rise to societal controversies about their potential risks and benefits. Over the last decades, social scientists, psychologists, and philosophers have criticized quantitative approaches to risk on the grounds that they oversimplify its societal and ethical implications. There is broad consensus amongst these scholars that stakeholders and their values and concerns should be included in decision-making about technological risks. (...) It has also been argued that the emotional responses of people can shed important light on the ethical aspects of risk and uncertainty. However, people’s emotions can be narrowly focused and biased. This article therefore assesses the role that technology-inspired artworks can play in overcoming such biases, by challenging our imagination and providing us with different perspectives on possible technological developments and their implications for society. Philosophers have not yet studied such artworks, so this constitutes an entirely new field of research for scholars of risk and moral theory. In particular, we focus on the case of BNCI technologies and related artworks. These technologies and artworks touch on questions of what it means to be human, thereby raising profound ethical and philosophical challenges. We discuss the experiences of artists, scientists, and engineers who are directly involved with BNCI technologies, and who were interviewed during a Hackathon at Amsterdam’s Waag Society in June 2016. Their views are analyzed in light of philosophical and aesthetic theories, which allows us to consider relevant ethical and conceptual issues as well as topics for further investigation. (shrink)

This book provides a rich, systematic, and accessible introduction to moral psychology, aimed at undergraduate philosophy and psychology majors. There are eight chapters, in addition to a short introduction, prospective conclusion, and extensive bibliography. The recipe for each chapter will be: a) to introduce a philosophical topic (e.g., altruism, virtue, preferences, rules) and some prominent positions on it, without assuming prior acquaintance on the part of the reader b) to canvass and explain the relevance of a particular domain of empirical (...) inquiry (e.g., evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience) to the topic c) to argue for some tentative conclusions about the topic d) to suggest further avenues for conceptual and empirical research The guiding theme of the book is that moral philosophy without psychological content is empty, whereas psychological investigation without philosophical insight is blind. Thus, I advocate a holistic approach that pictures moral psychology as a project of collaborative inquiry into the descriptive and normative aspects of the human condition. Ideally, students will come away from (a course built around) the book with the sense that, though philosophy may not be the queen of the sciences, its role is not merely to interpret scientific results. (shrink)

In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who also proliferate online. (...) We can approach this problem via the individual or via the network, asking two questions. First, holding the topology of the network constant, which moral and epistemic dispositions are conducive to successful inquiry by nodes at different positions within it? Second, holding the distribution of people’s epistemic dispositions constant, which network topologies are more likely to produce epistemic goods and avoid epistemic ills? To answer these questions, we need to combine virtue-theoretic reflection on individual dispositions with a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of networks. In this paper, I highlight and explore some important properties of such networks and connect those properties with dispositions that make someone an excellent member of an epistemic network. (shrink)