In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmpathy has been taken to play a crucial role in ethics at least since the Scottish Enlightenment. More recently, a revival of moral sentimentalism and empirical research on moral behavior has prompted a renewed interest in empathy and related concepts and on their contribution to moral reasoning and to moral behavior. Furthermore, empathy has recently entered our public discourse as having the power to ameliorate our social and political interactions with others.The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent (...) to which such a role can be actually granted. Before focusing on a positive assessment, I will delve into a few problems our ordinary concept of empathy and our commonsensical way of conceiving its connection to ethics will need to face. Specifically, I will show how an exaggerated reliance on the ordinary concept of empathy could lead to an underestimation of its biases and potential limitations, how a naïve conception of its connection to morality can overlook relevant counterexam... (shrink)

: Within the otherwise lively debate on neuroethics, little attention has been devoted to the peculiar methodological issues and challenges it faces. My aim is to track down its methodological specificities. Firstly, I will investigate to which traditional debates neuroethics bears similarity and to what extent it actually represents a novelty in ethical thinking. While the ethics of neuroscience is akin to bioethics, the neuroscience of ethics seems akin to moral psychology. And yet they differ as far as the level (...) of explanation of human moral behavior and reasoning is concerned. Thus, while the neuroscience of ethics and moral psychology share a family resemblance, they cannot be reduced to one another. Secondly, I will explore three different philosophical temperaments towards the role empirical findings can and should have in normative ethics and in metaethics. Prudential reasons would recommend openness to new sources of evidence without risking either reductionism nor neglect. Keywords: Neuroethics; Methods; Moral Psychology; Empirical Ethics; Levels of Explanation I metodi della neuroetica: la neuroscienza dell’etica è davvero una nuova sfida per la filosofia morale? Riassunto: Nonostante il dibattito in ambito neuroetico sia molto vivace, poca attenzione è stata dedicata alla questione relativa al suo metodo specifico e ai problemi a cui va incontro. Il mio scopo è quello di identificare le specificità metodologiche di questa disciplina. Anzitutto cercherò di determinare a quali dibattiti tradizionali la neuroetica può essere avvicinata e in che misura invece questa costituisce una novità all’interno del pensiero etico. Mentre l’etica della neuroscienza ha delle affinità con la bioetica, la neuroscienza dell’etica appare maggiormente simile alla psicologia morale, sebbene tali discipline siano diverse fra loro per via del livello a cui spigano il comportamento morale umano e il ragionamento. Pertanto, nonostante la neuroscienza dell’etica e la psicologia morale rivelino una certa somiglianza di famiglia, non è possibile ridurre l’una all’altra. In secondo luogo esplorerò tre diversi atteggiamenti filosofici rispetto al ruolo che i risultati empirici giocano o dovrebbero giocare rispetto all’etica normativa e alla metaetica. Ragioni di prudenza suggeriscono di rimanere aperti verso nuove fonti di evidenza evitando tanto il riduzionismo quanto la trascuratezza. Parole chiave: Neuroetica; Metodi; Psicologia morale; Etica empirica; Livelli di spiegazione. (shrink)

Background. Since the nineties, policymakers and theorists working across several disciplines started to entertain the notion of directly engaging the public in matters of public concern. Accompanying this was the attempt to resort to deliberative democracy in order to make such an involvement effective. Seizing on its intrinsic dialogic nature, some scholars proposed the application of public deliberation to the realm of public bioethics. Drawing upon the theory and practice of deliberative public bioethics, the purpose of this paper is to (...) shed light onto the figure of the bioethical expert and its role in public bioethics, and relatedly, to investigate how deliberation may be implemented in a public bioethics context. Methods. We set up a large-scale experiment to investigate whether, and to what extent, different moderation styles impact on participants’ moral preferences. The study combines a survey of a representative sample of the general population with a laboratory experiment based on a random sample of students that ex-ante has identical attitudes to the general population.Results. Findings show that: i) different moderation styles can significantly influence deliberative outcomes; iii) the effects of deliberation are not necessarily immediate, but may be revealed after the end of deliberative session; iii) participants tend to better appreciate a bioethical expert acting as “passive moderator”, namely as someone who acts in order to ensure non-domination and non-interference, thus allowing the creation of basic conditions for equality within the deliberative setting.Conclusions. Our experiment represents an example of how deliberation can be employed in public bioethics. (shrink)

In this paper I will try to provide some arguments against a broad definition of “empathy”. Firstly, I will deal with attempts to define empathy as an umbrella concept. Then, I will try to point out the four main elements which contribute to the confusion that researchers in both the social and political as well as the scientific and philosophical domains face when dealing with empathy. In order to resolve this confusion, I suggest applying David Marr’s distinction to the field (...) of empathy. Instead of providing an umbrella definition for empathy, which tries to account for all the data coming from different disciplines, I believe understanding that there are different levels of explanations and that different disciplines can contribute to each of them will provide a more detailed and less confused definition of empathy. (shrink)

Riassunto: Nel suo contributo Rosalba Morese si occupa di tre fenomeni di particolare interesse per comprendere il modo in cui gli esseri umani di fatto si comportano nei confronti dei loro simili quando sono coinvolte le loro identità di gruppo, ovvero l’altruismo parrocchiale, la punizione antisociale e la punizione altruistica. Scopo di questo lavoro è indagare se e in quale misura i dati comportamentali e di risonanza magnetica funzionale riportati da Morese possano informare le nostre teorie morali normative. Se, cioè, (...) esse possano non solo informarci circa il modo in cui di fatto gli esseri umani si comportano, ma se possano influire sulla nostra comprensione di come essi dovrebbero comportarsi; se dicano qualcosa del “dover essere” oltre che dell’“essere”. Parole chiave: Altruismo parrocchiale; Punizione antisociale; Punizione altruistica; Etica descrittiva; Etica normativa Parochial Altruism, Antisocial Punishment, and Altruistic Punishment: What Contribution Can Empirical Data Make to the Understanding of Ethics?: In her contribution, Morese takes into account three phenomena that are particularly interesting for understanding how human beings actually behave towards others when their group identities are involved – i.e. parochial altruism, antisocial punishment, and altruistic punishment. The aim of this commentary is to understand if and to what extent the behavioral and fMRI data reported by Morese can also inform our moral normative theories. That is, if they can inform us not only about how human beings actually behave, but also influence our understanding of how they should behave; if they tell us something about the “ought” as well as the “is”. Keywords: Parochial Altruism; Antisocial Punishment; Altruistic Punishment; Ethics; Normative Ethics. (shrink)