The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to (...) luck than is compatibilism. But compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection: historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck; non-historical compatibilisms run into insurmountable difficulties with the epistemic condition on control over action. Levy argues that because epistemic conditions on control are so demanding that they are rarely satisfied, agents are not blameworthy for performing actions that they take to be best in a given situation. It follows that if there are any actions for which agents are responsible, they are akratic actions; but even these are unacceptably subject to luck. Levy goes on to discuss recent non-historical compatibilisms, and argues that they do not offer a viable alternative to control-based compatibilisms. He suggests that luck undermines our freedom and moral responsibility no matter whether determinism is true or not. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to argue, by example, for neuroethics as a new way of doing ethics. Rather than simply giving us a new subject matter—the ethical issues arising from neuroscience—to attend to, neuroethics offers us the opportunity to refine the tools we use. Ethicists often need to appeal to the intuitions provoked by consideration of cases to evaluate the permissibility of types of actions; data from the sciences of the mind give us reason to believe that some (...) of these intuitions are less reliable than others. I focus on the doctrine of double effect to illustrate my case, arguing that experimental results suggest that appeal to it might be question-begging. The doctrine of double effect is supposed to show that there is a moral difference between effects that are brought about intentionally and those that are merely foreseen; I argue that the data suggest that we regard some effects as merely foreseen only because we regard bringing them about as permissible. Appeal to the doctrine of double effect therefore cannot establish that there are such moral differences. (shrink)

An influential model holds that obsessive–compulsive disorder is caused by distinctive personality traits and belief biases. But a substantial number of sufferers do not manifest these traits. I propose a predictive coding account of the disorder, which explains both the symptoms and the cognitive traits. On this account, OCD centrally involves heightened and dysfunctionally focused attention to normally unattended sensory and motor representations. As these representations have contents that predict catastrophic outcomes, patients are disposed to engage in behaviors and mental (...) rituals designed to forestall these outcomes or to produce more precise information. The same representations also cause the cognitive traits characteristic of sufferers. (shrink)

Whatever its implications for the other features of human agency at its best — for moral responsibility, reasons-responsiveness, self-realization, flourishing, and so on—addiction is universally recognized as impairing autonomy. But philosophers have frequently misunderstood the nature of addiction, and therefore have not adequately explained the manner in which it impairs autonomy. Once we recognize that addiction is not incompatible with choice or volition, it becomes clear that none of the Standard accounts of autonomy can satisfactorily explain the way in which (...) it undermines fully autonomous agency. In order to understand to what extent and in what ways the addicted are autonomy-impaired, we need to understand autonomy as consisting, essentially, in the exercise of the capacity forextended agency.It is because addiction undermines extended agency, so that addicts are not able to integrate their lives and pursue a Single conception of the good, that it impairs autonomy. (shrink)

The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation (...) of what it means to cause another harm or distress, the content of violations of rules against harm will be of a lower grade than the content of similar actions by normal individuals. Second, I argue that in order to intend a harm to a person—that is, to intend the distinctive kind of harm that can only befall a person—it is necessary to understand what personhood is and what makes it valuable. The psychopath's deficits with regard to mental time travel ensure that s/he cannot intend this kind of harm. (shrink)

What is morality? In Practical Expressivism, I argue that morality is a purely natural interpersonal co-ordination device, whereby human beings express their attitudes in order to influence the attitudes and actions of others. -/- The ultimate goal of these expressions is to find acceptable ways of living together. This 'expressivist' model for understanding morality faces well-known challenges concerning 'saving the appearances' of morality, because morality presents itself to us as a practice of objective discovery, not pure expression. -/- This book (...) demonstrates how a properly developed expressivist view can overcome this objection, by showing that even if moral practice is fundamentally expressive, it can still come to possess those features that make it appear objective (features such as talk and thought of moral disagreement, truth and belief, and the applicability of logical notions to moral sentences). The key to this development is to emphasise the unique and intricate practical role that morality plays in our lives. Practical expressivism is also practical in the further sense that it provides repeatable patterns that expressivists can deploy in coming to understand the apparently objective features of morality. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the problem of omission for the counterfactual comparative account of harm. A given event harms a person, on this account, when it makes her worse off than she would have been if it had not occurred. The problem arises because cases in which one person merely fails to benefit another intuitively seem harmless. The account, however, seems to imply that when one person fails to benefit another, the first thereby harms the second, since the second (...) person would have been better off if the first had benefited her. I argue that the cases of failing to benefit at issue are in fact cases of harming. They are cases of preventive harm. I also argue that we can explain away the intuition that no harm occurs in these cases, and that the relevant implication of the counterfactual comparative account is consistent with a variety of plausible views about the moral significance of harm. (shrink)

In applied ethics, debates about responsibility have been relentlessly individualistic and synchronic, even as recognition has increased in both philosophy and psychology that agency is distributed across time and individuals. I therefore warmly welcome Brown and Savulescu’s analysis of the conditions under which responsibility can be shared and extended. By carefully delineating how diachronic and dyadic responsibility interact with the long-established control and epistemic conditions, they lay the groundwork needed for identifying how responsibility may be inter-individual and intra-individual. Unsurprisingly, I (...) don’t agree with every aspect of their rich account. I strongly suspect that the privileged place the individual continues to occupy in their taxonomy is a residue of the kind of internalist intuitions which dominate WEIRD thinking.1 2 However, I won’t pursue this line of thought here. Instead, I apply Brown and Savulescu’s analysis. Moving beyond the programmatic level at which they develop their account, I will show how it provides a basis for excusing many individuals, focusing not on the dyadic level but the diachronic. Most of the …. (shrink)

Most philosophers think that phenomenal consciousness underlies, or at any rate makes a large contribution, to moral considerability. This paper argues that many such accounts invoke question-begging arguments. Moreover, they’re unable to explain apparent differences in moral status across and within different species. In the light of these problems, I argue that we ought to take very seriously a view according to which moral considerability is grounded in functional properties. Phenomenal consciousness may be sufficient for having a moral value, but (...) it may not be necessary, and it may contribute relatively little to our overall considerability. (shrink)

I am to grateful to Geoff Keeling for his perceptive response1 to my paper.2 In this brief reply, I will argue that he does not succeed in his goal of showing that nudges to reason do not respect autonomy. At most, he establishes only that such nudges may threaten autonomy when used in certain ways and in certain circumstances. As I will show, this is not a conclusion that should give us grounds for particular concerns about nudges. Before turning to (...) this issue, let me correct some small issues of interpretation of my paper. Keeling takes me to be committed to three descriptive claims: that we have entered a post-truth era, that our problem with the rational assessment of evidence is explained by or stems from the backfire effect and that nudges to reason work by exploiting affective mechanisms. I am not committed to accepting any of these claims. …. (shrink)

Can our cultural membership excuse us from responsibility for certain actions? Ought the Aztec priest be held responsible for murder, for instance, or does the fact that his ritual sacrifice is mandated by his culture excuse him from blame? Our intuitions here are mixed; the more distant, historically and geographically, we are from those whose actions are in question, the more likely we are to forgive them their acts, yet it is difficult to pinpoint why this distance should excuse. Up (...) close, historically or geographically, we tend to be less forgiving: few of us excuse the Taliban for what they did to women and homosexuals; and if there is less of an outcry concerning treatment not all that dissimilar in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, this is probably only because these actions are less well publicized. (shrink)

Introduction HLA Hart: A biographical sketch Jurisprudence is the theoretical study of a practical subject. Its object is to achieve a systematic and ...

According to the ego-depletion account of loss of self-control, self-control is, or depends on, a depletable resource. Advocates of this account have argued that what is depleted is actually glucose. However, there is experimental evidence that indicates that glucose replenishment is not necessary for regaining self-control, as well as theoretical reasons for thinking that it is not depleted by exercises of self-control. I suggest that glucose restores self-control not because it is a resource on which it relies, but because it (...) serves as a signal of environment quality. I suggest that the evidence is better explained by a rival opportunity costs model of self-control than by the ego-depletion account. (shrink)

The author comments on the article “The Neurobiology of Addiction: Implications for Voluntary Control of Behavior,‘ by S. E. Hyman. Hyman’s article suggests that addicted individuals have impairments in cognitive control of behavior. The author agrees with Hyman’s view that addiction weakens the addict’s ability to align his actions with his judgments. The author states that neuroethics may focus on brains and highlight key aspects of behavior but we still risk missing explanatory elements. Accession Number: 24077912; Authors: Levy, Neil (...) 1,2; Email Address: [email protected]; Affiliations: 1: University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia; 2: University of Oxford; Subject: ADDICTIONS; Subject: ALCOHOLISM; Subject: COGNITION; Subject: BEHAVIOR; Subject: JUDGMENT; Subject: HYMAN, S. E.; Subject: NEUROBIOLOGY; Number of Pages: 2p. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many people now believe that human reproductive cloning – once sufficiently safe and effective – should be permitted on the grounds that it will allow the otherwise infertile to have children that are biologically closely related to them. However, though it is widely believed that the possession of a close genetic link to our children is morally significant and valuable, we argue that such a view is erroneous. Moreover, the claim that the genetic link is valuable is pernicious; it (...) tends to give rise to highly undesirable consequences, and therefore should be combated rather than pandered to. The emphasis on the genetic is unwarranted and unfortunate; rather than giving us moral reason to support reproductive cloning in the case of infertility, the fact that cloning requests are likely to be motivated by the genetic argument gives us reason to oppose its availability. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue on empirically informed moral theory sketches the more important contributions to the field in the past several years. Attention is paid to experimental philosophy, the work of philosophers like Harman and Doris, and that of psychologists like Haidt and Hauser.

The novice/expert problem is the problem of knowing which apparent expert to trust. Following Alvin Goldman’s lead, a number of philosophers have developed criteria that novices can use to distinguish more from less trustworthy experts. While the criteria the philosophers have identified are indeed useful in guiding expert choice, I argue, they can’t do the work that Goldman and his successors want from them: avoid a kind of testimonial scepticism. We can’t deploy them in the way needed to avoid such (...) scepticism, because it would take genuine expertise to do so. I argue that attempts to deploy them in this sort of deep way involve a kind of transgression akin to, and at least as unreliable as, epistemic trespassing. We should give up trying to solve the novice/expert problem and instead promote better epistemic trust. (shrink)

McKenna’s critique (rather than criticisms) of idealized approaches to epistemology is an important contribution to the literature. In this brief discussion, I set out his main concerns about more idealized approaches, within and beyond social epistemology, before turning to some issues I think he neglects. I suggest that it’s important to pay attention to the prestige hierarchy in philosophy, and to how that hierarchy can serve ideological purposes. The greater prestige of more abstract approaches plays a role in determining what (...) issues and what voices we attend to. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Joshua Blanchard has identified a novel problem: the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. We find ourselves in unwelcome epistemic company when we hold a belief that is also held mainly or most prominently by those we regard as morally or epistemically bad. Blanchard argues that some, but not all, unwelcome epistemic company provides higher-order evidence against our belief. But he doesn't provide a test for when company is unwelcome or a diagnosis of why (...) it is unwelcome. I provide both. On my disjunctive test, unwelcome epistemic company provides us with a defeater when either there is a match between the content of the belief and the properties that make our company unwelcome, or there is reason to suspect that the belief arose via a shared, unreliable, causal process. (shrink)

We are all apt to alter our beliefs and even our principles to suit the prevailing winds. Examples abound in public life, but we are all subject to similar reversals. We often accuse one another of hypocrisy when these kinds of reversals occur. Sometimes the accusation is justified. In this paper, however, I will argue that in many such cases, we don’t manifest hypocrisy, even if our change of mind is not in response to new evidence. Marshalling evidence from psychology (...) and evolutionary theory, I will suggest that we are designed to update our beliefs in response to social signals: as these signals change, we change our minds, often without even noticing. (shrink)

This is a controversial work of applied legal theory, addressing urgent contemporary questions about law and the state, about the character of the UK as a state, and about the juridical character of the European Union.

I distinguish and assess three separate arguments utilized by the opponents of cochlear implants: that treating deafness as a medical condition is inappropriate since it is not a disability; that so treating it sends a message to the Deaf that they are of lesser worth; and that the use of such implants would signal the end of Deaf culture. I give some qualified support to the first and second claim, but find that the principal weight of the argument must be (...) borne by the third argument: that use of the cochlear implants is impermissible because Deaf culture is intrinsically valuable. I show that this claim is, in practice, incompatible with the claim that deafness is not a disability: that the significant disadvantages suffered by the hearing impaired can only be corrected by measures that would end Deaf culture. Since the potential recipients of cochlear implants are, in the main, the prelingually deaf children of hearing parents, the burden of banning the implants would be borne by people who are not members of Deaf culture, and who owe that culture nothing over and above what we all owe cultures in general. I conclude that we cannot ask the parents of these children to sacrifice the interests of their children for the sake of Deaf culture. (shrink)

The thesis that propositions of law are intrinsically arguable is opposed by the antithesis that the Rule of Law is valued for the sake of legal certainty. The synthesis considers the insights of theories of rhetoric and proceduralist theories of practical reason, then locates the problem of indeterminacy of law in the context of the challengeable character of governmental action under free governments. This is not incompatible with, but required by the Rule of Law, which is misstated as securing legal (...) certainty. Defeasible certainty is the most that is desirable or achievable. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References Further reading.

Rationalist accounts of self-knowledge are motivated in important part by the claim that only by looking to our reasons to discover our beliefs and desires are we active in relation to them and only thereby do we take responsibility for them. These kinds of account seem to predict that self-knowledge generated using third-personal methods or analogues of these methods will tend to undermine the capacity to exercise self-control. In this light, the insistence by treatment programs that addicts acknowledge that they (...) are addicts seems puzzling. I argue that because addicts—and perhaps ordinary akratics, to some extent at least, too—are vulnerable to losing control of their actions via losing control over their beliefs, advising them to look to their reasons for actions is counterproductive and facilitates loss of control. In contrast, an insistence on what I call impersonal self-knowledge, knowledge of some of one's states and dispositions generated by third-personal means, may help to reestablish control. (shrink)

It is widely held that some kinds of deception into sex (e.g., lying about what pets one likes) do not undermine the moral force of consent while other kinds of deception do (e.g., impersonating the consenter’s partner). Tom Dougherty argues against this: whenever someone is deceived into sex by the concealment of a “deal breaker” fact, the normative situation is the same as there being no consent at all. Here it is argued that this conclusion is unwarranted. Dougherty’s negative arguments (...) against alternative theories of the deceptive undermining of consent are flawed, and his two positive arguments are unjustified. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses whether quantum entanglement can be made compatible with Humean supervenience. After reviewing the prima facie tension between entanglement and Humeanism, I outline a recently-proposed Humean response, and argue that it is subject to two problems: one concerning the determinacy of quantities, and one concerning its relationship to scientific practice.

To the extent that indeterminacy intervenes between our reasons for action and our decisions, intentions and actions, our freedom seems to be reduced, not enhanced. Free will becomes nothing more than the power to choose irrationally. In recognition of this problem, some recent libertarians have suggested that free will is paradigmatically manifested only in actions for which we have reasons for both or all the alternatives. In these circumstances, however we choose, we choose rationally. Against this kind of account, most (...) fully developed by Robert Kane, critics have pressed the demand for contrastive explanations. Kane has responded by arguing that the demand does not need to be met: responsibility for an action does not require that there be a contrastive explanation of that action. However, this response proves too much: it implies that agents are responsible not only for the actions they choose, but also for the counterfactual actions which were equally available to them. (shrink)

The influence of virtue theory is spreading to the professions. I argue that journalists and educators would do well to refrain from placing too much faith in the power of the virtues to guide working journalists. Rather than focus on the character of the journalist, we would do better to concentrate on institutional constraints on unethical conduct. I urge this position in the light of the critique of virtue ethics advanced, especially, by Gilbert Harman (1999). Harman believed that the empirical (...) findings of psychologists show that character-based approaches to ethics are useless. I suspect that this rather overstates the case. Nevertheless, special features of journalism make virtue-centered approaches especially inappropriate, and we had best turn to alternatives. (shrink)

In a recent paper “Safety, Sensitivity, and Differential Support” (Synthese, December 2017), Jose Zalabardo argues that (contra Sosa in Philos Perspect 33(13):141–153,1999) sensitivity can be differentially supported as the correct requirement for propositional knowledge. Zalabardo argues that safety fails to dominate sensitivity; specifically: some cases of knowledge failure can only be explained by sensitivity. In this paper, I resist Zalabardo’s conclusion that domination failure confers differential support for sensitivity. Specifically, I argue that counterexamples to sensitivity undermine differential support for sensitivity. (...) Using Zalabardo’s modal framework, I consider a less demanding modal condition, what I call weak sensitivity, and I explain how weak sensitivity avoids an influential counterexample to sensitivity. However, I argue that we can subvert that counterexample only by abandoning Zalabardo’s case for domination failure. So either way, we cannot differentially support sensitivity. (shrink)

In Minds, Brains, and Law, Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson argue that current attempts to use neuroscience to inform the theory and practice of law founder because they are built on confused conceptual foundations. Proponents of neurolaw attribute to the brain or to its parts psychological properties that belong only to people; this mistake vitiates many of the claims they make. Once neurolaw is placed on a sounder conceptual footing, Pardo and Patterson claim, we will see that its more dramatic (...) claims are false or meaningless, though it might be able to provide inductive evidence for particular less dramatic claims (that a defendant may be lying, or lacks control over their behavior, for instance). In response, I argue that the central conceptual confusions identified by Pardo and Patterson are not confusions at all. Though some of the claims made by its proponents are hasty and sometimes they are confused, there are no conceptual barriers to attributing psychological properties to brain states. Neuroscience can play a role in producing evidence that is more reliable than subjective report or behavior; it therefore holds out the possibility of dramatically altering our self-conception as agents and thereby the law. (shrink)

Drawn sequences of images, like those in comics and picture stories, are a pervasive and fundamental way that humans have communicated for millennia. Yet, the study of visual narratives has only recently gained traction in Cognitive Science. Here we explore what has held back the study of the cognition of visual narratives, and why researchers should join in scholarship of this ubiquitous aspect of expression.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Norms, Conventions, and PsychopathsNeil Levy (bio)Keywordspsychopathy, morality, conventions, responsibilityI am grateful to my commentators for their provocative challenges to my claim that psychopaths ought to be excused moral responsibility for their wrongdoing owing to their (alleged) failure to grasp the moral/conventional distinction. I have learned from all the commentators—now, and in some cases in the past as well—and I am sincerely honored by their having taken my work seriously (...) enough to comment on it, even if only to take issue with it. In what follows, I shall attempt to reply to their main criticisms. As will shortly become clear, I do not here have the space for anything like adequate responses. Instead, I shall have to content myself with programmatic statements of how such responses might go. Let me admit at the outset that until the details of these responses are fully worked out, and the relevant empirical research conduced, I cannot be sure that the responses will succeed. Nevertheless, there are grounds for confidence, given the available data.Because there is some overlap between the criticisms, I shall address some of them—those of Blair, Nichols, and Vargas—by topic rather than by commentator, before turning to Mullen and Matravers.Is the Ability to Understand the Moral/Conventional Distinction a Necessary Condition of Aptness for Moral Responsibility?Blair, as well as Vargas and Nichols, suggests that an agent's knowing that an action is against the rules might be sufficient to ground responsibility for performing that action, even if the agent lacks the ability to draw the moral/conventional distinction. As Blair points out, we do not reserve blame only for those who violate moral rules. Blame, and sometimes punishments, are also meted out to those who violate merely conventional norms. Because psychopaths can understand conventional norms perfectly well, they may therefore seem to be appropriate targets of at least some kind of moral blame.But is it really the case that agents are (ever) blameworthy for violating conventional norms alone? Many philosophers, for instance when considering the morality of civil disobedience, have argued that conventional norms are typically backed by second-order moral norms. Hence, for many or all conventional norms, there is a (defeasible) moral obligation not to violate that norm, an obligation independent of the content of the conventional norm; it is because there are such second-order moral obligations that agents are blameworthy for violating conventional norms. [End Page 163] But if this is the case, then the fact that we sometimes blame agents for violating conventional norms is not evidence against the claim that the ability to grasp moral norms is a necessary condition of blameworthiness. There is no reason to think that psychopaths will find it any easier to grasp second-order moral norms than first-order (of course, they may understand that there are such things as second-order norms—norms concerning norms—but for them such norms will only be conventional). In fact, it might be more difficult to understand the moral force of second-order moral norms than first, inasmuch as the harms caused by violating such norms are emotional and not physical. Normal subjects invest (some) conventional norms with moral significance, and it is for this reason that we regard violations of such norms as apt to give rise to blame; lacking the ability to draw the moral/conventional distinction, psychopaths cannot invest such norms with moral significance. Once again, for them these norms are merely conventional, and they therefore fail to grasp the full significance of violating them.It might be objected that if conventional transgressions are (sometimes) backed up by second-order moral norms, children would not classify them as neatly as they do. They would misclassify some conventional norms as moral, insofar as they are backed up by second-order moral norms. They would therefore deny that violations of conventions are permissible on the say-so of an authority. There are two possible explanations of children's classifications, compatible with the suggestion that some conventions are backed by second-order moral norms. First, it may be that greater cognitive sophistication is required to grasp second-order moral norms than... (shrink)

Cushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulative cultural evolution.

In a recent article, I argued that Ploug and Holm’s ‘meta-consent’ proposal should be rejected for biobank governance. This was because, although meta-consent is permissible, it is both burdensome and ethically omissible. There is no ethical reason why funders should undertake the additional costs. Ploug and Holm have sought to respond to these arguments. Here, it is noted that not only do they fail to adequately refuse the case against meta-consent, they fail to even engage with the arguments, either misunderstanding (...) them or ignoring them. In their response, Ploug and Holm unwittingly provide the basis of an even stronger case against meta-consent. They argue that broad consent has a built in tendency to expire, while also holding that broad consent should be one of the options available in meta-consent. Meta-consent thus ends up being more like dynamic consent, but, arguably, even more burdensome and costly. (shrink)

A general method is provided whereby bizarre revisions of consistent theories with respect to contingent sentences that they refute can be delivered by revision-functions satisfying both the basic and the supplementary postulates of the AGM-theory of theory-revision.